Kingsville , population 25,000, may have the feeling of a small college town, but look a little closer and it's bursting with life. Monarchs flutter above cultivated butterfly gardens, green jays and great kiskadees call from the brush, and the air is fresh off the Gulf, which is only about half an hour away by car. The best part of a visit to this South Texas town, though, might be the town's friendly residents — in Kingsville, travelers are welcomed with open arms.

Kingsville is a relatively young community, founded in 1904 as an offshoot of the 825,000-acre King Ranch. The ranch culture permeates the town. The main streets are named after the ranching tycoons: King, of course; Kleberg, a family who married into the King clan; and Kenedy, King's partner in some ranching and railroad endeavors.

Downtown is the King Ranch Saddle Shop, featuring clothing, handbags and $800 boots of pirarucu fish leather. A few blocks over there's a King Ranch Museum, where you can learn all about the development of the quarter horse and the Santa Gertrudis breed of cattle, two of the King Ranch's proud accomplishments.

If ranching history is your thing, there's plenty here in Kingsville. There are ranch tours nearly every day, including birding tours for the avian-inclined (the ranch is home to 386 different species). But I also want to get to know Kingsville beyond the famous ranch. So I seek out some locals who can tell me more about their Kingsville.

Art of Borderlands

Kingsville into town on a January weekend. Our first stop is a local art gallery run by Santa Barraza, a Chicana artist born and raised in Kingsville. Her namesake gallery hosts several exhibits a year; we arrive on the last day of her annual exhibit on the Virgin Mary, and she shows us around.

Barraza's art bursts with color, taking inspiration from the people and landscapes of the borderlands. Green jays, maguey plants (also called agaves) and pre-Columbian symbols populate her dream-like paintings.

Decades ago, Barraza left Kingsville for graduate school, spent 15 years in Austin, then taught at Penn State and the Art Institute of Chicago. She ultimately decided to reside in her hometown of Kingsville. She got a job at Texas A&M University-Kingsville as a professor in the art department and bought and restored a historic Kingsville building that now houses her art gallery on Fifth Street.

I ask Barraza for some Kingsville must-dos, and she mentions the annual Ranch Hand Breakfast at the King Ranch, held in November. “A lot of people come to that from all over; it's a good thing to do,” she says.

The Ranch Experience

We're a couple of months too late for the Ranch Hand Breakfast, but the ranch offers tours year-round, so we head there next. Our shuttle bus takes us past pastures populated by deer, sandhill cranes, and the ranch's famous quarter horses and cattle.

As we drive, our tour guide walks us through the history of the ranch, which was established in 1853. Its legacy, as you might expect from a nearly 200-year-old institution, is long and colorful; steamboat captain-turned-rancher Richard King is credited as the father of American cattle ranching.

Around 200 descendants of the extended King family live around Texas and elsewhere. Many still visit theproperty, staying in the ranch's palatial main house, where peacocks strut the lawn.

We drive past the homes of the ranch workers and visit a saddle weaving workshop. The ranch is immersive — with its own school district and homes, it's easy to imagine spending a whole life here. And many have; some of the ranch workers are seventh-generation, descended from the original Kineños who traveled from Mexico to work for King in the 1800s.

Out on the Town

After the ranch, we decide to do a little shopping; the historic downtown offers boutiques galore, and antique mall Finders Keepers Village may look small from the outside but is vast and fascinating.

We meander through the campus of Texas A&M-Kingsville, a university that draws students from across the state and beyond with nearly 5,000 undergraduates. The school is famous for its biology and agriculture programs. Its Natural Toxins Research Center is one of the only snake venom-specific programs in the U.S., and if you've ever eaten a Ruby Red grapefruit, you have the school's Citrus Center to thank.

“[The university] is part of what makes Kingsville so unique,” says Krystal Emery, the university's assistant director for marketing and communications.

I meet up with Emery for coffee on Saturday afternoon, hoping to hear more about her relationship with the town. Emery does not disappoint. “I could talk all day about Kingsville,” she says.

She's lived here almost her entire life, with the exception of a couple of years when her parents decided to move the family to the Pacific Northwest, in the spirit of adventure. At one point, Emery's father, in conversation with her little brother, brought up some family members, including an aunt. “What's an aunt?” Emery's brother replied. The family moved back the next year. “Family is important,” says Emery. Family is one reason she decided to stay in Kingsville after graduating from high school and college. “I knew I wanted to raise my kids here,” she says.

From my short time here, I can already see what she means. The people I've met have taken the extra time to welcome me to town, offered me pastries from local bakery El Pastel and told me long, meandering stories about their lives in this quiet pocket of Texas.

According to Emery, the fourth Saturday of every month is the best time to come into town. That's the day of the Kingsville Farmers Market. “It's all local vendors that come in with their farm-raised eggs and their handmade jerky and freeze-dried candy,” she says.

After the farmers market, she recommends stopping for lunch at Harrel's Kingsville Pharmacy, a drug store and restaurant with an old-timey soda fountain, and then heading to the town's monthly Wine Walks. Participants purchase a wine “passport” and then wander the historic downtown, stopping into various stores to shop and sample regional wines.

For our part, we round out the day with a visit to Kingsville Steak House, where we enjoy an extravagant salad and a steak.

Sunday is for the Birds

The next day, after a filling Sunday brunch of tacos at Gerardo's Meat Market, a Mexican restaurant that came highly recommended from locals, we're craving some outdoor time.

South Texas is known for its birding opportunities, and we've got the birding bug. On Emery's recommendation, we head to Dick Kleberg Park to see what we can see. Situated on the southern outskirts of town, the park is a beautiful place for a walk. I watch giant water birds flap leisurely around the park's long, tree-lined lake. I wish I had brought binoculars so I could get a closer look at an egret across the water.

Luckily for me, we have another exciting bird activity planned later in the day. Eline and David Haunschild live south of town, on property bordered on one side by the King Ranch. Their property is home to El Potrero Photography Ranch, a local business where, for a flat fee of $150, aspiring bird photographers can spend an entire day, from sunup to sundown, traipsing between bird blinds with Hugh Lieck, a local photographer with a repertoire of shaggy dog jokes and a keen eye for the perfect bird portrait. Lieck met the Haunschilds through the Coastal Bend Wildlife Photography Contest, and has partnered with them to run the photography ranch since 2016.

Early on a Saturday morning, a visitor might find Lieck dragging a bucket of smelly deer entrails into a pasture on the Haunschild's land. This is the “raptor buffet,” an exciting event to watch, we hear. After Lieck spreads the meat, the scavengers descend — caracaras with their confident stance and tufty heads, black vultures and turkey vultures all hunched over, and Harris' hawks with furrowed brows.

We're not visiting on a buffet day, but there's still plenty to see. No sooner have we arrived than Lieck starts pointing out birds. “Hear that little tok-tok?” he says. “That's a yellow-billed cuckoo.”

Soon enough we see the cuckoo, followed by green jay after green jay. For the next few hours, Lieck drives us around to various blinds, each designed with the perfect shot in mind. A water bird blind is situated so photographers are at eye-level with the water, allowing for a beautiful portrait of a duck or other wading or floating bird. Chilly, and tired in a good way, we head back to town for dinner at Los Cabos Mexican Bar & Grill, where I enjoy a delicious burrito.

We head out the next morning, but on the drive we're already scheming our return. We have to see a raptor buffet, say to each other in the car. And we also want to see the other winged wonders that share the sky; Kingsville is home to a naval air station that sometimes hosts a Blue Angels airshow (not in 2024, unfortunately). We also need to take the 30-minute drive out to Baffin Bay to enjoy the family-style seafood of Kings Inn and expansive views of the water.

Previously, I knew of Kingsville only for its association with the King Ranch — famously bigger than the state of Rhode Island - but after a weekend of art, birds and good conversation, I feel connected to this beautiful slice of Texas culture.

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