Mustangs & Canals of Las Colinas

In the 1970s, oilman and rancher Ben Carpenter looked out over his family's 12,000-acre Hackberry Creek ranch northwest of downtown Irving and imagined something Texas had never seen: a master-planned city of glass towers, man-made lakes, and Venetian canals rising out of the blackland prairie. He called it Las Colinas — Spanish for 'the hills.' To give his new city a soul, Carpenter commissioned a Kenya-raised wildlife sculptor named Robert Glen to cast a herd of wild mustangs at one-and-a-half times life size, galloping through a granite stream as if the prairie had never been paved at all. This short walk takes you to the heart of that vision: the largest equestrian sculpture in the world, the pink-granite plaza built to frame it, the little museum that tells how it was made, and the European-style canal that winds beneath the towers a few blocks away. It's a tour about a place that invented itself — and about the wild horses Texas chose to remember.