Bolivar Peninsula (/ˈbɒlɪvər/ BOL-i-vər) is a census-designated place (CDP) in Galveston County, Texas, United States.

The peninsula was named in 1816 for Simón Bolívar,[3] the famed Venezuelan political leader involved in the independence movements of Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and other Latin American nations.

The pirates/privateers Jean Laffite and Louis-Michel Aury each used the Bolivar Peninsula as part of the pirate kingdom established around the Galveston Bay.

[3] The Point Bolivar Lighthouse (which is now privately owned and not open to the public) has an important history with the peninsula, built in 1872.

The lighthouse is located on the western end of the peninsula, directly across from Fort Travis seawolf Park.

[8] The Bolivar Peninsula suffered heavy damage from Hurricane Ike that made landfall on the Texas coast on September 13, 2008.

Its narrowest point is a quarter of a mile and is near the unincorporated community of Gilchrist, where the peninsula was divided by Rollover Pass.

[30] Prior to the opening of the current campus, the previous facility consisted of two separate buildings,[28] in Port Bolivar.

[36] At the height of the storm, Ike's cloud mass essentially covered the entire Gulf of Mexico.

The Wind and Surge Destructive Potential Classification Scale, which was detailed in Tropical Cyclone Destructive Potential by Integrated Kinetic Energy (by Dr. Mark Powell and Dr. Tim Reinhold, April 2007) offers a new way to assess hurricane size and strength by calculating the total kinetic energy contained in a 1-meter deep horizontal slice of the storm at an elevation of 10 meters above the land or ocean surface.

Entire communities along the upper Texas coast were simply wiped out by Ike's catastrophic storm surge.

[39] Ike's effects were disproportionally felt near the long, low-lying Bolivar Peninsula which has typical elevations around 2 m. Despite being only a strong category 2 storm with maximum winds at landfall of 95 knots (49 m/s, Berg, 2009), Ike's extremely large, long-lasting surge and waves devastated the peninsula.

Surge is extremely important for the particular case of the Bolivar Peninsula, as it allowed large waves to penetrate inland into areas they could not otherwise have reached.

[41] Most other houses in this area were reduced to either piles or slabs by large waves riding on surge, with only a very few remaining more or less intact.

Research observations also suggest most of eastern and southeastern Texas was subjected to tropical storm and hurricane-force winds for ten hours, and possibly longer.

[43][44] Cindy Horswell of McClatchy - Tribune Business News said that authorities said that 3,600 structures on the peninsula, 62% of them, were destroyed or severely damaged by Ike's storm surge.

[45] The United States Postal Service once operated the Gilchrist Post Office, which opened on September 16, 1950.

[48] Between Hurricane Ike and the opening of Our Lady by the Sea, Bolivar residents attended church in Galveston or in Winnie.

[47] Residents opposed to the demolition of Our Mother of Mercy expressed a negative reception to the opening of Our Lady by the Sea.