Dallas

In 1839, three years after Texas won its independence, John Neely Bryan surveyed land by three forks of the Trinity River, at a white-rock crossing where wagons could ford the water. He returned in 1841 to found a permanent settlement and named it Dallas. In the mid-1800s French socialists set up La Réunion, a short-lived commune along the river in what is now West Dallas, and the name survives in Reunion Tower.

The railways made the town. Lines crossing North Texas brought access to cotton, cattle and later oil, and by the end of the 19th century Dallas was a booming business and trading centre. In 1914 it was chosen as the seat of the Eleventh Federal Reserve District, and when the East Texas oil field was struck about 100 miles to the east, Dallas became the financial centre of the oil industry of Texas and Oklahoma. Latin American families, drawn by better living conditions and the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution, settled in a neighbourhood known as Little Mexico.

The city's most remembered day came in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza; the depository building overlooking it now holds a museum of his life and death. In the decades after, interstates and the opening of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in 1974 made the city a transport and corporate hub, and technology firms such as Texas Instruments grew along the Telecom Corridor to the north. In 2026 AT&T Stadium in nearby Arlington was one of the venues of the FIFA World Cup.

Dallas pairs business with big cultural investment. The Arts District north of downtown, the largest contiguous arts district in the United States, holds the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Crow Collection of Asian Art, the Meyerson Symphony Center and, in the AT&T Performing Arts Center, the Winspear Opera House and the Wyly Theatre, home of the Dallas Theater Center and the Dallas Black Dance Theatre. Next to them stands the Cathedral of Guadalupe, the seat of a very large Catholic diocese.

Deep Ellum was a hotbed of early jazz and blues in the 1920s and 1930s, when Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly played there; it is now the city's live-music and nightlife district. Oak Lawn and Bishop Arts have long been the centres of LGBT life.

Sport is followed intensely. The Mavericks and the Stars play downtown, and the Cowboys, winners of five Super Bowls, and the Texas Rangers, World Series champions in 2023, play in Arlington. The State Fair, held in autumn since 1886, is the city's signature event, and the Texas–Oklahoma football game is played at the Cotton Bowl in Fair Park each October. The population is diverse: Hispanic residents are the largest group in the city, and the suburbs hold large Chinese, Indian, Iranian and Russian-speaking communities.

About 1.3 million people lived in Dallas at the 2020 census, making it the third-largest city in Texas, and about 8.5 million in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country. The city has no navigable link to the sea yet is a major inland port, thanks to its railways, interstates and airport.

The economy is broad: defence, banking and private equity, information technology, telecommunications and transport. Many large companies have their headquarters in the city or its northern suburbs — among them Texas Instruments, 7-Eleven, Neiman Marcus and Mary Kay — and American Airlines is based beside the airport.

Most people in the metroplex live in the suburbs and drive. Oak Cliff and the south-west are largely Hispanic and the southern part of the city mostly Black, while North Dallas has enclaves of white, Black and especially Hispanic residents. Uptown and the area around downtown have filled with flats for young professionals. Summer heat indices regularly pass 105°F, and life moves indoors to air-conditioning.

Dallas is known for barbecue, Mexican food and Tex-Mex: cheese enchiladas, sizzling fajitas, bowls of queso and chips, all washed down with margaritas. The frozen margarita machine was invented here in 1971 by the restaurateur Mariano Martinez, and the drink has been a fixture of the city's Tex-Mex restaurants ever since.

Barbecue centres on beef brisket, slowly cooked in smoke in a wood-fired pit, as across Texas. Chicken-fried steak — a breaded, fried steak that German and Austrian immigrants adapted from their schnitzel recipes — is an important dish across the state.

Autumn means the State Fair, where Fletcher's corny dogs — hot dogs dipped in cornmeal batter and deep-fried on a stick — have been sold for decades, and where new deep-fried inventions, from fried butter to chicken-fried bacon, appear every year. The Dallas Farmers Market, one of the oldest in Texas, has farm stalls and an indoor food hall. For eating out, Uptown, Deep Ellum, Lower Greenville and the Bishop Arts District have the densest mix of restaurants and bars.