Poised at the entrance to the Lower Rio Grande Valley is RAYMONDVILLE, and the nearby LA SAL VIEJA, a great salt lake, which for the most of two centuries provided salt for South Texas and northern Mexico. From Raymondville it is only a twenty minute drive to the Gulf of Mexico at PORT MANSFIELD. Next are HARLINGEN and SAN BENITO, two palm-studded cities, situated side by side, frilled with tropical plants and fruits. Plush motels, lavish restaurants, reminiscent of Las Vegas with dazzling neon finery, dramatize the wide, sparkling, clean streets. The warm winter season is entertaining with its fiestas and cultural festivities. In San Benito a beautiful wide _resaca_ (Spanish for old river bed) is one of the largest and most picturesque left by the Rio Grande in its meandering around. Besides being the home of the Valley cotton industry, tremendous canning plants are located in this area. Every February the Municipal Golf Course is the scene of the nationally famous “Life Begins at Forty” invitational tournament. Once this beautiful valley setting was a tangle of thorny mesquite and cactus, but irrigation has turned it into a productive tropical resortland. The slogan of the Valley is “land of fruit, flowers and funshine.” Amid nature’s lavish display of grapefruit, oranges, lemons, limes, tangerines and tangelos, solemnly sit weathered old missions. Art here often takes the form of the weird figurine shapes of cactus huddling near the ground or jutting against the sky. About two-thirds of the people in the Lower Rio Grande Valley are of Latin-American descent. As a result, the Valley is bilingual. Even stop signs read “stop” and “alto.” Noted for their friendliness, the populace of the Valley (at this writing) is numbered around a half million. At the scene of the first shots fired in the Mexican War sits BROWNSVILLE, largest city in the Valley, named after Fort Brown, a military establishment that was earlier named Fort Taylor. Here are battle sites marking places where General Zachary Taylor defeated the Mexicans during his victorious march through the Valley. Just outside the city is Palmetto, a site that has the distinction of being the actual last battleground of the Civil War, when three hundred Confederates stationed at Fort Brown defeated seventeen hundred Federalists who tried to capture the cotton stored in Brownsville warehouses. This was six weeks after the surrender of Lee at Appomattox; due to poor communications of the time news of the surrender had not reached Texas. Now Fort Brown serves as Texas Southmost College. The old buildings and breastworks of the fort still remain.