Houston

Houston was founded on 30 August 1836 by two land investors from New York, the brothers Augustus Chapman and John Kirby Allen, at the meeting of Buffalo Bayou and White Oak Bayou, a spot now known as Allen's Landing. They named it after Sam Houston, who had won Texas its independence at San Jacinto a few months earlier, and persuaded the Republic of Texas to make it the temporary capital until the government moved to Austin in 1839. The town grew as a trading centre for cotton, and by 1860 it had become a commercial and railway hub for the cotton export trade, much of it worked by enslaved people.

The 20th century transformed it. The 1900 hurricane crippled Galveston, then the state's main port; in 1901 oil was struck at Spindletop near Beaumont; and the deep-water Port of Houston, reached by a ship channel dug through the bayou, was opened by President Wilson in 1914. Refineries and petrochemical plants lined the channel during the Second World War, the Texas Medical Center was founded in the 1940s, and NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, now the Johnson Space Center, opened in 1963; its Mission Control, known by the radio call sign "Houston", was first used for Gemini 4 in 1965. The Astrodome, the world's first domed sports stadium, followed in 1965.

The city boomed again in the late 1970s as people moved from the Rust Belt, and survived the collapse of Enron, a Houston energy company, in 2001. Floods are its recurring trial: Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, a run of floods in 2015 and 2016, and Hurricane Harvey in August 2017, which stalled over the region, dropped more than 50 inches of rain in places and killed more than 70 people. A derecho caused widespread damage in May 2024, and in 2026 the city was one of the hosts of the FIFA World Cup.

Houston is often described as the most ethnically and culturally diverse metropolitan area in the United States. Around a fifth of the people of the metro area were born abroad, most of them from south of the Mexican border, and there are large Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian and Pakistani communities — the South-West has a Chinatown and the Mahatma Gandhi District — as well as the largest Muslim community in the southern United States. The city is also the most politically diverse in a generally conservative state.

The Museum of Fine Arts and the Menil Collection are among the major museums of the country, and the city is one of the few in the country with permanent professional companies in opera, ballet, orchestral music and theatre, most of them based in the Theater District downtown. Houston hip-hop has a strong identity, from the Geto Boys to Destiny's Child, Bun B, Travis Scott and Megan Thee Stallion.

The calendar's biggest event is the Livestock Show and Rodeo each March, when western wear appears in offices across the city. Juneteenth has deep roots here, celebrated since the 1870s at Emancipation Park in the Third Ward. Houston follows the Astros in baseball, the Texans, formed in 2002, in football and the Rockets in basketball, and Montrose has long been the centre of the city's LGBT community.

About 2.3 million people lived in the city at the 2020 census, and about 7.8 million in Greater Houston, the fifth-largest metropolitan area in the country. The city covers more than 640 square miles, and with no zoning code, offices, houses, shops and bars sit side by side; besides downtown there are office districts in Uptown around the Galleria, the Medical Center, Greenway Plaza and the Energy Corridor.

Energy is still the backbone of the economy, from oil company headquarters to the refineries and petrochemical plants along the ship channel, which is itself a large part of the economic base. Wind and solar are growing, and the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world, employs more than 120,000 people. The University of Houston, with some 49,000 students near the Third Ward, and Rice University beside Hermann Park are the main universities.

Life is lived by car: more than three-quarters of commuters drive alone, on a system of freeway loops and long straight roads. Summer days are spent moving between air-conditioned houses, offices and shops, and evenings and mild winters bring people out to the bayou parks. Flooding, traffic and air pollution, much of it from the ship channel industries, are long-running concerns. The mayor is John Whitmire.

Houston is highly regarded for its diverse food and restaurant culture. Tex-Mex — fajitas of grilled skirt steak, cheese enchiladas, queso and margaritas — is the everyday local cooking, and Texan steakhouses and barbecue are never far away.

Louisiana Creole cooking — boudin, shrimp creole, crawfish, gumbo and jambalaya — is part of the city's table, and Vietnamese restaurateurs serve "Viet-Cajun" crawfish, seasoned inside and outside the shell. Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants, once clustered east of downtown and in Midtown, have largely moved to the new Chinatown along Bellaire Boulevard, which now holds kitchens from across Asia, while the Mahatma Gandhi District around Hillcroft Avenue is the place for Indian and Pakistani food. Other neighbourhoods have their own kitchens, such as Salvadoran, Honduran and Mexican food in Gulfton.

Montrose and the Heights are known for their restaurants, and the oldest restaurant still operating in Houston in 2022 was Christie's Seafood and Steaks. Kolaches, sweet buns of fruit in yeast dough brought by Czech immigrants, are known across Texas, where the name also covers the sausage-filled klobasnek first made by Czech settlers in the state.