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Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge is a 2,088-acre (8.45 km2) National Wildlife Refuge situated along the banks of the Rio Grande, south of Alamo in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, in Hidalgo County, Texas. This sub-tropical sanctuary harbors one of the highest wildlife diversities of any single unit in the National Wildlife Refuge system and has been referred to as the "Gem of the National Wildlife Refuge System". Many Mexican and tropical species reach the northern limit of their distributions in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, including several that occur nowhere else in the US. Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge preserves one of the largest tracks of old growth habitat in the Lower Rio Grande, in a region where much of the land use has been dominated by, and shifted over the last century, from small farms, to commercial agro-industries, to significant population growth and urban development in recent decades. The wildlife refuge was established in 1943 to protect one of the last remnants of subtropical Rio Grande riparian forest and migratory birds. In a unique location in the US, where diverse climates and habitats of south Texas merge (tropical, temperate, thorn forest, wetlands, Gulf Coastal grasslands), it has a reputation for diverse birding.