Port Isabel

Port Isabel sits at the very bottom of Texas, tucked against the Laguna Madre just before the causeway leaps across to South Padre Island, and it has the salt-worn, unhurried feel of a working port town rather than a beach resort. Lia and I based ourselves here specifically to avoid the high-rise crowd across the water, and found instead a place of shrimping boats, cinderblock seafood shacks, and a lighthouse that’s been guiding vessels through the Brazos Santiago Pass since 1852.

Climbing the lighthouse

The Port Isabel Lighthouse is the only lighthouse in Texas open to the public, a squat white tower you can climb via a tight spiral staircase for a 360-degree view over the Laguna Madre, the causeway, and South Padre’s skyline across the water. We timed our visit for late afternoon, and the reward was worth the cramped stairs: below us, the town’s small shrimp fleet was untying from the docks, engines churning brown water as they headed out through the pass for a night on the Gulf, a ritual the lighthouse has watched unfold for well over a century.

The harbor and fresh shrimp

Down at the working harbor, boats unload directly onto ice at small dockside markets, and we bought a bag of shrimp straight off a boat for less than we’d have paid for a single restaurant plate. The town’s seafood shacks lean unpretentious — plastic tables, paper trays, hush puppies on the side — and at the Yacht Club Hotel’s restaurant we watched pelicans dive-bomb the channel while we ate fried oysters. Port Isabel’s whole identity runs through this harbor; even its small history museum, housed in an old ice-and-cold-storage building downtown, is really a story about the shrimping industry that built the town.

Getting There

Valley International Airport in Harlingen is the closest airport, about a thirty-minute drive southeast via Highway 100. Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport is a similar distance south. From either, it’s a straight shot down flat coastal highway before the causeway comes into view. There’s no train service, so a rental car is the practical option, and it also makes it easy to cross the causeway for a beach day without needing to pay South Padre’s higher lodging rates.