The Winter Texan season

From November to April the Valley's population goes up by roughly 100,000 people, and almost none of them are tourists.

Winter Texans are seasonal residents. Most are retired, most come from the Upper Midwest and the Canadian prairies, most drive down in the fall and back in the spring, and most return to the same park — often to the same site in the same park — year after year. Around 53,000 households come south for the season, and they arrive with their community already assembled: clubs, committees, choirs, card nights, a newsletter, and a bulletin board.

The first thing to get right is the word. The community's own term is Winter Texan. It is what the parks use, what the universities that study the season use, and what people call themselves. Snowbird is an outsider's word and a fair number of people here dislike it. That is not a small thing. Using the right word is the difference between sounding like you live here and sounding like you read about it once.

The season has a shape, and it is the same every year

August through October is when the decision gets made, at a kitchen table 1,500 miles north, choosing a park and reserving a site for a stay of four or five months. Late October through December is the arrival, with a heavy wave right after Thanksgiving. January and February are the full house — parks at capacity, activity calendars at their densest, and the busiest stretch of the year for a great deal of the Valley. March starts the drift north, roughly around the livestock show and spring break, and by the end of April the season is over and the parks are quiet.

If you are reading this in August or September, you are reading it at exactly the right moment.

Where the season actually lives

There are more than 500 RV parks and seasonal communities across the four counties, and each one runs its own weekly calendar. That calendar is a sheet of paper on a bulletin board by the office door. Somebody types it up, prints it on Monday, and it is very likely the most complete listing of what is happening in the Valley that week — and it is invisible to anyone not standing in front of it.

That is not a criticism of the parks. It is a description of how the season has always run, and it works perfectly well for the people inside the park. It is also why a Winter Texan two miles away has no idea that the park down the road has a conjunto playing on Thursday.

What a week actually looks like

• Dances — the most requested thing in the entire season, from park bands to halls that fill up on a weeknight
• Bingo — probably the highest-volume single event type of the whole season
• Potlucks and coffee hours — the social spine of a park, and where you find out about everything else
• Cards and games — euchre, hand and foot, dominoes, shuffleboard, pickleball
• Craft fairs and bazaars — from November until the season ends, in parks, halls and churches
• Day trips — South Padre, the birding centers, the state parks, and a day across the bridge
• Classes and shops — Spanish lessons, line dancing, woodworking, quilting, exercise early while it is still cool

Most of it is free or close to it, and most of it is open to people from outside the park more often than outsiders assume. Ask at the office.

When the family comes

That means whole weeks spent entertaining people who do not know the Valley at all — usually including grandchildren.

The Valley is genuinely good at that. The beach at South Padre, the birding centers and the state parks, the museums, a pulga on a Saturday morning, a jamaica if the timing works out, and a day across the bridge if everyone's documents are in order. Nearly all of it is inexpensive and a large share of it costs nothing.

The season is smaller than it was

It would be dishonest to write this page without saying so. The number of Winter Texans coming to the Valley has fallen from its peak, and park operators, city officials and the researchers who count them agree on the direction. The reasons people give differ depending on who you ask, and no single one of them explains it on its own.

It is still an enormous season. It supports well over ten thousand jobs across the four counties and it remains one of the largest seasonal populations of its kind anywhere in the country. Smaller is not small.

What a Valley resident should know

If you run a restaurant, book a hall, play in a band, or work anywhere near a park, this is the most predictable demand in your year and the worst served. It starts in November, it peaks in January, it books further ahead than the rest of the Valley does, and it eats and goes out early. An event that starts at nine at night is not for this season.

We keep a separate page for the season's things — parks, dances, craft fairs, day trips — at /winter-texans/. This guide is the explanation. That one is the directory.