Texas is a state situated in the South Central United States, nicknamed the Lone Star State. Texas is the second largest U.S. state in both area and population. Houston is its largest city and the fourth-largest in the United States, while the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area is the chief metropolitan area in the state and the fourth-largest in the nation.
It extends from the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley northward into the heart of the Great Plains. Texas is roughly spade shaped. The vast expanse of the state contains great regional differences.

East Texas

East Texas, the land between the Sabine and Trinity rivers, is Southern in character, with pine-covered hills, cypress swamps, and remnants of the great cotton plantations founded before the Civil War. Cotton farming has been supplemented by diversified agriculture, including rice cultivation; almost the state’s entire huge rice crop comes from East Texas, and even the industrial cities of Beaumont and Port Arthur are surrounded by rice fields.

Rivers and Lakes

Texas’s largest river is the Río Grande, which flows southeastward for 2,100 km long the border between Texas and Mexico. The principal rivers that flow across the central part of the state from the Great Plains or Central Lowland to the Gulf of Mexico are the Colorado, Trinity, and Brazos rivers.
The Colorado River is particularly important because it has been dammed to form several large artificial lakes. Two other large rivers are the Red River, which forms most of the boundary between Texas and Oklahoma, and the Sabine River, which marks part of the border between Texas and Louisiana. Shorter rivers that flow across the Gulf Coastal Plain include the Nueces, the San Antonio, the Guadalupe, the Lavaca, and the San Jacinto.

Gulf Coast and plains

The Gulf Coastal Plains stretches from the Gulf of Mexico inland to the Balcones Fault and the Eastern Cross Timbers. This large area stretches from the cities of Paris to San Antonio to Del Rio but shows a large variety in vegetation. The industrial heart of the coastal area is Houston, the fourth largest city in the nation. Houston’s development was spearheaded by the digging (1912-14) of a ship canal to the Gulf of Mexico, and the city today is the nation’s second largest port in tonnage handled.

Rio Grande Valley

The long stretch of plains along the Rio Grande valley is largely given over to cattle ranching. Texas has 1,610 km of border with Mexico. Some S and W Texas towns are bilingual, and in some areas persons of Mexican descent make up the majority of the population. Laredo is the most important gateway here to Mexico, with an excellent highway to Mexico City and important over-the-border commerce.

Interior Lowlands

The Interior Lowlands are bounded by the Caprock Escarpment to the west, the Edwards Plateau to the south, and the Eastern Cross Timbers to the east. This area includes the North Central Plains around the cities of Abilene and Wichita Falls, the Western Cross Timbers to the west of Fort Worth, the Grand Prairie, and the Eastern Cross Timbers to the east of Dallas.

Blackland Prairies

The first region to be farmed when Americans came to Texas in the 1820s was the bottomland of the lower Brazos and the Colorado, but not until settlers moved into the rolling blackland prairies of central and N central Texas was the agricultural wealth of the area realized. The heart of this region is the trading and shipping center of Waco; at the southwest extremity is San Antonio, the commercial center of a wide cotton, grain, and cattle country belt.

High Plains

The Balcones Escarpment marks the western margin of the Gulf Coastal Plain; in central Texas the line is visible in a series of waterfalls and rough, tree-covered hills. To the west lie the south central plains and the Edwards Plateau; they are essentially extensions of the Great Plains but are sharply divided from the high, windswept, and canyon-cut Llano Estacado in the W Panhandle by the erosive division of the Cap Rock Escarpment.

This is all about the geography of the state of Texas.

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