Odessa, Texas: Where the Jackrabbit Is Eight Feet Tall and the Stonehenge Is Slightly Shorter

If you've Googled "Odessa" and found a gorgeous Black Sea port with a UNESCO-listed city center, congratulations, you are in the wrong Odessa. This is the other one, the West Texas one, where the sea is a sea of pumpjacks and the World Heritage Site is a fiberglass bunny. Buckle up.

The Town Larry McMurtry Wouldn't Put on a Brochure

Let's start with the nasty review. Pulitzer-winning novelist Larry McMurtry once called Odessa the ugliest town in Texas. Odessa's response was to laugh it off, which is the most West Texas form of conflict resolution imaginable.

The locals have a saying: you raise your kids in Midland and raise hell in Odessa. Midland is the neighbor with the manicured lawn. Odessa is the neighbor with a monster truck, a smoker the size of a Buick, and an unexplained trampoline.

The town got its name in 1881, when it was founded as a railroad water stop. That is the most generous act of imagination in Ector County history, and the town has been coasting on it ever since.

Today the city is home to roughly 115,000 to 120,000 people, depending on which estimate you trust. With 115,322 people, Odessa is the 35th most populated city in Texas by one count. Census Bureau estimates differ, and one puts the 2024 figure at 119,748. It's also young: the median age is in the low 30s, so the average resident is old enough to rent a car but young enough to still think a lifted F-250 is a personality.

Your Tourist Itinerary: A Bunny, Some Rocks, and Shakespeare

Odessa's attractions read like someone sent a very confident intern to build a greatest-hits tour of England and then ran out of budget at the bunny.

The Jackrabbit. Jack Ben Rabbit, an eight-foot-tall fiberglass statue, is Odessa's unofficial mascot as well as a Texas historical landmark. It was commissioned by the Odessa Chamber of Commerce in 1962 and named for John Ben Shepperd, a former Texas Attorney General and Odessa booster, as a tribute to the jackrabbit roping competition held at the Odessa Rodeo. Yes, that's the Jackrabbit-Roping Capital of Texas thing. There's also a citywide scavenger hunt for uniquely decorated jackrabbit statues, so if you finish lunch early, you now have a hobby.

The Stonehenge. On the University of Texas Permian Basin campus sits an astronomically aligned replica of Stonehenge. It's smaller than the original in England. Odessa has plagiarized England and, like a student who changed three words, made it a little shorter.

The Globe. The Globe of the Great Southwest is a replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, on the south side of Odessa College's campus. It seats 410 and the complex even features a reproduction of Anne Hathaway's cottage. To be fair, this is legitimately charming. Hamlet under a West Texas sky is a flex.

Fair's fair: the town also has a real meteor crater, 550 feet wide and free to walk. And the Presidential Museum is dedicated entirely to the U.S. presidency. The honest itinerary takes about a day, but you get to decide whether that's a compliment.

Friday Night Lights Was Not a Documentary. Okay, It Was.

Odessa's greatest cultural export is Friday Night Lights, the book about a city that hung its self-esteem on teenage boys in a stadium. The town has been trying to live up to (or live down) that story since 1990. When the oil crashed, football was the only thing left. When the oil boomed, football was still the only thing left, because the eternal local lament is that there's "nothing to do."

That boom-and-bust rhythm is the whole story here. The population graph looks like an EKG, and it swings with oil prices. Today the surrounding region has bounced back, and the Odessa metro area counts about 170,000 people. Whatever the barrel price is, Odessa has been through worse, including a pandemic and a Larry McMurtry review.

Permian and Odessa High fans show up in black and red, an oil spill versus a bloodstain, and treat the rivalry like a funeral for everybody's weekend.

The Best Food in Town Is in a Parking Lot

Texas Monthly found some of the best carnitas in the state in a parking lot in Odessa, and the surprise was the whole headline. Reader, the surprise is the food truck. West Texas is the land of the taco trailer, and when over half your population is Hispanic, your best meals are probably not served on a linen tablecloth.

Then there's the town's famous phrase, "Gentleman from Odessa," a polite-company euphemism for a son of a bitch. It's the only item on the menu you can't order out loud.

Practical tip for visitors: eat outside, bring napkins, and don't ask whether the restaurant has a wine list. It has a salsa list.

The Verdict

Odessa is not the worst town on Earth, whatever McMurtry's mood that day. It's a young, growing, oil-fueled, football-obsessed, Hispanic-majority city of over 110,000 with a real meteor crater, a legit Shakespeare theater, and carnitas that make food critics sheepishly update their maps. Is it a destination? Eh. Is it memorable? Ask the rabbit.

Think we were too nice? See the full roast on RoastMyTown.com.