Willacy County Texas map
26.48° N · 97.60° W · County seat: Raymondville · 785 sq mi
Willacy County is the quiet northern edge of the Rio Grande Valley: 20,164 people, three small towns and a farm grid of cotton, grain sorghum and sugarcane, with a quarter of its 785 square miles under the shallow water of the Laguna Madre. Its outlet to the Gulf is not a river mouth but a channel dredged straight through Padre Island in the 1950s.
Raymondville sits on I-69E/US-77 in the western half. SH-186 runs east from it to Port Mansfield on the Laguna Madre; the barrier island and the Gulf are beyond.
Where Willacy County is
The county was created in 1911 from parts of Cameron and Hidalgo counties and organized the following year, named for John G. Willacy, the state senator who wrote the bill. It was then reshaped: in 1921 its northern half became Kenedy County, the seat moved from Sarita to Raymondville, and more territory was added from Cameron and Hidalgo to make up the difference.
Kenedy County is now the northern neighbour, Cameron County lies south and Hidalgo County west; the Gulf of Mexico is east. Harlingen is 21 miles south on I-69E, Brownsville 41 miles south, Edinburg 37 miles southwest on SH-186 and Corpus Christi about 100 miles north on US-77.
Towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Raymondville (county seat) | City | 10,227 |
| Lyford | City | 2,259 |
| San Perlita | City | 535 |
Half the county lives in Raymondville. Sebastian and Santa Monica are unincorporated farm communities on the west side, and Port Mansfield, on the lagoon, is an unincorporated place run by the county's navigation district.
Roads
- Interstate 69E / US-77 – the north–south freeway, entering from Cameron County past Lyford and running through Raymondville before crossing the empty King and Kenedy ranch country toward Kingsville. It is the main route between the Valley and the rest of Texas, and the Border Patrol checkpoint at Sarita, just over the line in Kenedy County, sits on it.
- SH-186 – the county's east–west road, running from Port Mansfield west through Raymondville and on toward Edinburg in Hidalgo County.
- FM 498 – the farm road east of the freeway linking Lyford and the farming communities toward San Perlita, part of the grid that carries most of the county's local traffic.
Port Mansfield and the Laguna Madre
Port Mansfield is a small fishing and shipping settlement on the west shore of the Laguna Madre, at the end of SH-186. Its link to the open Gulf is the Mansfield Channel, dredged straight through Padre Island in the 1950s — a man-made pass that also marks the southern boundary of Padre Island National Seashore, so that everything north of it is federal parkland and everything south is beach reachable only by boat or a long drive around to South Padre.
The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway runs down the lagoon past the port, and the water is shallow, hypersaline and full of seagrass — the reason Willacy County's shoreline draws redfish and speckled trout guides and wintering waterfowl in numbers out of proportion to the county's size. The northern end of Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge reaches into the county's southeast corner.
Farming
Away from the water Willacy County is flat, black-soil farmland, worked in large blocks: cotton, grain sorghum, corn, sugarcane and vegetables, with cattle on the drier northern range. The county's growing season is long enough that cotton is planted in February and harvested in July, months ahead of the High Plains, and the gins and grain elevators along the railroad at Raymondville and Lyford are the tallest structures for miles.
The population has been flat to slightly falling — 20,164 in 2020 and an estimated 20,027 in 2024 — while the counties immediately south and west have grown fast, which is what keeps Willacy feeling like the far edge of the Valley rather than part of it.