Mustang Island State Park

Mustang Island State Park is 3,954 acres with about 5 miles of beach on the Gulf of Mexico in Nueces County, south of Port Aransas. It was acquired from private owners in 1972 and opened to the public in 1979. The earliest known inhabitants of Mustang Island were Karankawa Indians, known for their fierceness and cannibalism. The Karankawas were a hunter-gatherer people and depended heavily on shellfish and mussels for food. Encountered first by Spanish explorers, the Karankawas survived in the region until the 19th century. The island was first named Wild Horse Island, then Mustang Island, because of the wild horses, called "Mestenos," brought to the island by the Spaniards in the 1800s. The first historical record of Mustang Island was by Alonso Alvarez de Pineda, who charted this section of the Gulf Coast in 1519. In 1747, Captain Joaquin Orobioy Basterra landed here and trekked overland to a bay that he named San Miguel Arcangel. The bay was renamed Corpus Christi by Diego Ortiz Parrilla, who made detailed explorations of the coast in 1756. A notable event occurred in 1553, when a Spanish treasure fleet encountered a hurricane off Padre Island. Many ships were lost, and only two survivors lived to reach Mexico.