Zavala County Texas map
28.87° N · 99.76° W · County seat: Crystal City · 1,301 sq mi
Zavala County grows spinach. Crystal City has called itself the spinach capital of the world since the 1930s, put up a statue of Popeye outside its city hall in 1937 and still holds a spinach festival — and the artesian water that made that claim possible is what turned this corner of the brush country into the Winter Garden district.
Crystal City sits in the southwest quarter on US-83. La Pryor is 15 miles northwest at the US-83 and US-57 junction; Batesville is in the northern half of the county.
Where Zavala County is
The legislature created the county in 1858 from Maverick County but there were not enough settlers to organize it until 1884. It is named for Lorenzo de Zavala, who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence and served as the Republic's first vice-president.
It borders six counties: Uvalde north, Medina northeast, Frio east, Dimmit south, Maverick west and Kinney at the northwest corner. It does not touch the Rio Grande — Eagle Pass and the border are 46 miles southwest — and there is no interstate inside it. San Antonio lies 86 miles northeast, Del Rio 77 miles northwest and Laredo 94 miles southeast.
Towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Crystal City (county seat) | City — the county's only incorporated place | 6,355 |
Two thirds of the county lives in Crystal City. Everything else is unincorporated: La Pryor, at the crossing of US-83 and US-57 in the north, and Batesville, an older farming settlement in the northeastern quarter, are the only other communities of any size. The 2024 census estimate put the whole county at 9,209, down from 9,670 in 2020, a slow decline that has run for decades.
Roads
- US-83 – runs northwest to southeast through La Pryor and Crystal City, north toward Uvalde and south toward Carrizo Springs and Laredo.
- US-57 – crosses the northern part of the county, running southwest from La Pryor to Eagle Pass and northeast toward I-35 at Moore.
- SH-65 – leaves Crystal City to the northeast through the farm country toward Batesville.
- Farm-to-market roads – the irrigated blocks north and east of Crystal City are laid out on a grid of FM roads rather than on any through highway, which is why the county's traffic concentrates so tightly on US-83.
The Winter Garden
The Winter Garden district — Zavala, Dimmit, Frio and La Salle counties — is named for a growing season that lets vegetables come out of the ground in the months when the rest of the country cannot plant. Drilling into the Carrizo–Wilcox aquifer in the first decade of the twentieth century produced flowing artesian wells, land companies sold irrigated tracts to Midwestern buyers on the strength of them, and spinach, onions, cabbage and carrots followed.
Spinach became the local emblem. The Popeye statue was raised in Crystal City in 1937, when the cartoon was new and the growers wanted the association; it is generally described as the first statue of a cartoon character anywhere. Packing sheds and a spinach cannery followed the crop, and the seasonal harvest work drew a farmworker population whose descendants are most of the county today.
Water pressure has fallen since the artesian years and pumping costs more, so acreage is down and cattle, hunting leases and Eagle Ford oil work have taken up some of the slack.
Two pieces of history
During the Second World War the federal government ran an internment camp at Crystal City, opened in 1942 and operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service until 1948. Unlike most camps of the period it held whole families — people of Japanese, German and Italian descent, including several thousand brought from Latin American countries at the request of the United States — and some were later used in prisoner exchanges. The site southeast of town is marked.
Two decades later Crystal City was the centre of Texas Chicano politics: a slate of Mexican American candidates swept the city council in 1963, a school walkout in 1969 turned into a months-long boycott, and the Raza Unida Party was organized here in 1970 before running statewide campaigns.