Port Isabel Lighthouse: Coming Home to a South Texas Landmark
Growing up near Brownsville, the Port Isabel Lighthouse was just there. Part of the landscape. Something you passed on the way to South Padre Island without really stopping to look at it because it had always been there, and you assumed it always would be.
It took moving to Boston to make me actually go inside.
I visited while I was back home in South Texas, and standing at its base as an adult with a camera felt completely different from every childhood drive-by. The lighthouse was built in 1852 to guide ships through the Brazos Santiago Pass into Port Isabel, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. It is one of the few surviving antebellum lighthouses in Texas and the only one in the Rio Grande Valley, which I somehow never fully appreciated growing up right next to it.
The property is small, and the lighthouse itself is not tall by lighthouse standards, but what it lacks in scale, it makes up for in character. Walking around the grounds I kept thinking about how many times I had driven past it as a kid staring out the car window, and the childhood rumors that it was haunted, which I fully believed for longer than I am willing to admit. The lighthouse does have a certain presence, especially in the late-afternoon light when the white exterior warms, and the sky behind it starts doing things.
There is something particular about returning to a place from your childhood with a camera. You see it differently. You look for the angle instead of just absorbing it. But you also feel it more because the memory is already in the frame before you even take the shot.
If you are ever along the Texas coast working your way to South Padre Island, Port Isabel is worth the stop. The lighthouse is open for tours, and you can climb to the top for views of the bay and the island in the distance. And if you grew up passing it on the way to the beach, the way I did, go back and actually stop this time. It deserves more than a drive-by.
It always did.
