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 Hearst Castle - San Simeon, CA
N 35° 41.113 W 121° 10.086
10S E 665767 N 3950580
A true palace, built by newspaper magnate W.R. Hearst
Waymark Code: WM3HM1
Location: California, United States
Date Posted: 04/07/2008
Views: 66
"This is what God would have built if he had had the money."
George Bernard Shaw
The "Enchanted Hill"
Beginning in 1919, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst began to construct a spectacular castle on his ranch in San Simeon, California. While the outside of the 60,645 square feet large main building was modeled after a Spanish cathedral, the interior is furnished with antiques, art, and entire rooms brought from all over Europe.
Hearst referred to it usually just as "The Ranch" and the official name, "La Cuesta Encantada" ("The Enchanted Hill") doesn’t ring much of a bell either, but under its public name Hearst Castle it became world famous.
Wikipedia has an excellent article on the castle so we will not bore you with history and statistics but rather share our visit in Spring of 2008.
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Since it is impossible to see everything in one day, Hearst Castle offers several tours, covering different parts of the castle. We recommend the evening tour for a couple of reasons:
- It combines highlights of all the other tours
- It is less crowded
- Volunteers dressed as visitors in the style of the 1920s add to the experience!
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Our tour started with a magnificent sunset at the Greek-style outdoor pool.
From the pool, we went upstairs to the main castle.
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Now, let’s go inside...
 Guest Room |
 Music Hall
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A little trivia:
Does the dining hall look familiar? Harry Potter’s dining hall at Hogwarts Academy was modeled after it! The picture to the left shows the original dining hall at Hearst Castle, the picture to the right is Hogwarts’ Mess Hall, built by Warner Bros.
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Understandably, the use of flash lights is not permitted inside the castle. With the sun gone, most of our inside pictures (except for the three above) didn’t turn out so well.
Fortunately, other people had more luck and we borrowed a couple of pictures from the Bhandari Family and from Declan McCullagh. |
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While we are at borrowed pictures, xmwallpapers has a great bird’s eye view of the castle:
Back to our own pictures: There are some 20,000 statues, vases, pictures and other artifacts in and around the castle. Here are some of them:
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The tour ended at the Roman inside pool, laid out with a giant mosaic. We got two lucky pictures. If you want to see more about that marvel, check out mosaicart.
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We hope you enjoyed our little tour. There is only one thing left to do: Enjoy the Sunset!
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Accessibility: Partial access
Condition: Intact
Admission Charge?: yes
Website: [Web Link]
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