Coral Castle #1

Around 1980, I saw a re-run of the old television show called "In Search Of, With Leonard Nimoy." This particular program talked about a place in Homestead, Florida called Coral Castle, and how it came to be build. I was mesmerized by the show, and the first time I got to go to south Florida, I went to see Coral Castle.

There once was a Latvian man named Edward Leedskalnin. He emigrated to the U.S., then in 1918 he moved to Florida after he had developed tuberculosis.

He ended up buying some land and building a monument, Coral Castle, to his "sweet sixteen", his almost-bride who jilted him in Latvia. (Billy Idol's 1980's hit, Sweet Little Sixteen, was written about this after he visited Coral Castle in the 80's. THERE's a bit of trivia I'll bet you didn't know.)

The Coral Castle, Ed's monument to his lost love, was built entirely by Ed Leedskalnin's own hands, with NO HELP FROM ANYONE. Every stone was cut out of the ground, lifted, carved and placed by Ed, BY HIMSELF, with only the aid of mechanical devices he devised from parts of a Model A Ford.

The ancient coral he dug up and carved is extremely heavy.

And Edward Leedskalnin was five feet tall (1.52m), and weighed 100 pounds (45.4kg).

We visited here in 1984 on a trip to south Florida, and these are a few of the pictures I took on that trip. We went again in 1998, but I won't be up to that point in my slide scanning for a couple of years yet.

It is basically a coral wall about eight feet tall and forming a square about 150 feet or so per side of a square. He filled it with all manner of carved coral things he prepared himself.

This first one is the outside of the "castle" wall. You can see the pit where Ed cut and lifted the coral from. Each section of the wall weighed like 20-40 thousand pounds.


This tower was in one corner of the "castle" and the lower room behind the doors is where Ed kept his tools, and the upper section with the windows is where Ed lived and slept. Look at the size of each of those chunks of coral, and think about how much each must weigh, and then picture a five foot tall, one hundred pound man lifting and placing each one by himself.


If I remember correctly, this monolith weighed 30 thousand pounds and is about 12-15 feet tall. He cut it out of the ground, carved and lifted into place by himself with the aid of only the tripods and ropes he assembled.


This is a view of part of what is inside the four walls of Coral Castle. The rocking chair on the right of the photo up on the pedestal weighed about 1500 pounds (680kg) and it was comfortably carved in the seating area and rocked really easily. This whole place is simply astounding.


More tomorrow.