San Patricio County Texas map
28.01° N · 97.52° W · County seat: Sinton · 707 sq mi
San Patricio County is the north shore of Corpus Christi Bay, and in the last decade it has become one of the busiest heavy-industry corridors in Texas: a new flat-roll steel mill outside Sinton, an LNG export plant and an ethane cracker either side of Gregory, and a crude oil export terminal on the old naval station at Ingleside. Behind that waterfront the county is still cotton, grain sorghum and small farm towns.
Sinton is at the centre on US-181. The bay shore runs along the bottom right through Portland, Gregory, Ingleside and Aransas Pass; Mathis and Lake Corpus Christi are at the northwest corner on I-37.
Where San Patricio County is
The county sits directly across the water from Corpus Christi, whose centre is 16 miles to the south, and it is part of the same metropolitan area. Six counties touch it: Bee to the north, Refugio northeast, Aransas east, Nueces southeast across Nueces and Corpus Christi bays, Jim Wells southwest and Live Oak northwest.
The Nueces River forms the southwestern boundary with Nueces County before it reaches Nueces Bay. Land runs from sea level on the bay to about 200 feet in the western part of the county. Victoria is 63 miles northeast and San Antonio 114 miles northwest in a straight line.
This is one of the original counties of the Republic of Texas, set up in 1836 around the Irish colony of San Patricio de Hibernia, founded on the Nueces in the 1820s by the empresarios John McMullen and James McGloin and named for Saint Patrick. The village of San Patricio was the first county seat; the courthouse moved to Sinton, on the railroad, in the 1890s. San Patricio still exists as an incorporated place of 384 people, one of the smallest former county seats in the state. Nueces County was carved out of San Patricio's territory in 1846.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population in county |
|---|---|---|
| Portland (part) | City | 20,431 |
| Ingleside (part) | City | 9,519 |
| Aransas Pass (part) | City | 7,592 |
| Sinton | City (county seat) | 5,542 |
| Mathis | City | 4,336 |
| Taft | City | 2,798 |
| Odem | City | 2,256 |
| Gregory | City | 1,741 |
| Ingleside on the Bay | City | 610 |
| Lake City | Town | 448 |
| San Patricio | City | 384 |
| Lakeside | Town | 338 |
Portland, on the bluff at the north end of the Nueces Bay causeway, is the largest place and functions as a commuter suburb of Corpus Christi. Aransas Pass and Ingleside both straddle county lines into Aransas and Nueces. Taft and Odem are farm towns on the black prairie, Gregory sits between Portland and the industrial docks, and Mathis, Lake City and Lakeside are clustered at the eastern end of Lake Corpus Christi.
Roads
- US-181 – the main street of the county. It crosses the Harbor Bridge out of Corpus Christi, climbs the Portland bluff, passes Gregory, Taft and Sinton and continues north to Beeville.
- Interstate 37 – clips the northwestern corner past Mathis, carrying San Antonio traffic toward Corpus Christi.
- US-77 – enters from Refugio County, runs south through Sinton and Odem and joins I-37; the corridor is being upgraded to I-69E.
- State Highway 35 – the coastal route, northeast from Aransas Pass over the causeways to Rockport and Port Lavaca, southwest to the Nueces Bay crossing.
- State Highway 361 – from SH-35 at Aransas Pass out past Ingleside to the free ferry that crosses the ship channel to Port Aransas.
- State Highway 188 – the diagonal from Sinton southeast through Gregory toward Aransas Pass and Rockport.
- State Highway 359 – begins at Mathis and runs west toward Alice, Hebbronville and eventually Laredo.
- State Highway 89 – a short farm route linking Odem and Sinton with the country north of the Nueces.
The industrial north shore
La Quinta Channel and the deep water off Ingleside gave the county room for plants that could not fit inside the Corpus Christi inner harbor. Cheniere's Corpus Christi liquefaction terminal, on the channel near Gregory, shipped its first LNG cargo in 2018 and has been expanding since. Immediately inland, the Gulf Coast Growth Ventures plant — an ExxonMobil and SABIC joint venture — cracks ethane into polyethylene and started up in 2022. Steel Dynamics built a flat-roll steel mill on open ground north of Sinton that produced its first coil at the end of 2021, drawing a cluster of coating and processing plants around it.
Ingleside's waterfront was Naval Station Ingleside, commissioned in the 1990s as the Navy's mine warfare home port and closed under the 2005 base realignment round. The docks were sold and are now the Enbridge Ingleside Energy Center, one of the largest crude oil export terminals in the country. Between them these sites have made a county of fewer than 70,000 people one of the biggest exporters in the United States by volume.
Lake Corpus Christi
At the northwest corner, the Nueces River is dammed to form Lake Corpus Christi, the reservoir that supplies drinking water to the city and to much of the Coastal Bend. The eastern end of the lake lies in San Patricio County around Mathis, and Lake Corpus Christi State Park is on the shore just southwest of the town, with campsites, a fishing pier and boat ramps. Water levels swing hard with drought, and the lake's storage is watched closely because the region has few alternatives.
- Texas lakes map
Reservoirs across the state with their rivers, dams and surface area.
- Texas state parks map
Every state park with its county and nearest town.