America's most diverse city and the capital of the global oil industry — where NASA's Mission Control guided every human moon landing, the Houston Medical Center is the world's largest medical complex, and the food scene reflects every immigrant cuisine from Vietnamese to Salvadoran to Nigerian
Houston (2.3 million city; metro 7.3 million) is the fourth-largest city in the United States and the most ethnically diverse major city in America — no single ethnic group constitutes a majority, and Houston has the largest Vietnamese community in the US outside California, the largest Salvadoran community in the country, and significant Nigerian, Chinese, Mexican, Indian, and Korean populations. The Texas Medical Center (50 institutions, 106,000 employees, 10 million patient visits per year) is the world's largest medical complex — larger than downtown Dallas. NASA's Johnson Space Center (e…
Houston was founded in 1836 by brothers Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen on the banks of Buffalo Bayou, 50 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, and named after Sam Houston — the first president of the Republic of Texas. The discovery of oil at Spindletop, Beaumont (90 miles east), on 10 January 1901 — the most significant oil discovery in US history at that time — transformed Houston into the hub of the global petroleum industry. The Houston Ship Channel (completed 1914) made the inland city a major deep-water port, and the oil industry's concentration here (ExxonMobil, Chevron, S…