The Enchanted Hill - La Cuesta Encantada

Words fail me when I try to come up with descriptions of Hearst Castle.



Priceless medieval tapestries and Hollywood gaudiness; oddly-proporioned rooms built specially to house the incredibly ornate ceilings imported whole from Europe; opulence and ostentation set against austere wind-swept hills where cows still graze alongside zebras from what used to be the world's biggest private zoo. Magnificent, but mad.

View from a terrace. The whole estate is illuminated by caryatids, two of which are in this picture

I am afraid my pictures do not fully capture the uniqueness of the place.

A branch full of mandarins against the background of a poolside colonnade

The reason for that is not my inadequacy as a photographer (of course) but the incredibly tight security on the premises.

The pool house modeled on a Greek Parthenon - rather more Epicurean than Spartan. 

First of all, nobody is allowed to drive up to the castle. You leave the car at the visitor center by the ocean, and are then put on a bus and driven about 5 miles inland along a winding road to the hill-top castle.

The approach to the castle with lots of citrus trees and palms

The path was designed so that the castle keeps appearing and disappearing along the way (nothing was allowed to stick out of the bus windows, so no pictures). All the 40 or so people on the bus are one tour group which is shepherded rather briskly around the property.

A glimpse of a replica of Donatello's David behind a rhododendron

Our guide told us straight away that when he goes up the stairs, we go up the stairs, and not left, right or down. There was another person herding us from the rear, and a security guard wired with a microphone and a walkie-talkie circling around the group.

A bas relief at the grand entrance

We could touch absolutely nothing, except specially designated rails. Photographs were to be taken as we walked along, no re-takes or second chances, and if someone's baseball cap gets in the way of a beautiful view, that's too bad for you. Sheesh.

Castle grounds with lots of roses

No flash was allowed, so I got no interior pictures either. It's all their fault, you see.

A fuchsia blooming against clean geometric lines of the stonework

Now for the facts. The castle was built (and never finished) in the first half of the 20th century by media tycoon William Hearst. The property is enormous and sits on 240,000 acres of hilly land fronting San Simeon bay in Central California.

The main house, La Casa Grande, was modeled on the cathedral in the Spanish town of Ronda.

One of two towers of La Casa Grande, housing Mr. Hearst's bedroom

George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright and one of many famous guests at Hearst Castle, apparently said: "Mr. Hearst, yours is the kind of castle that God would build if He had your kind of money."

Ornate carving above the main entrance to La Casa Grande

 It was fascinating for me to see a rose (Cécile Brunner, if you are wondering) carefully wrapped around the palm tree with thin wire supports going up maybe 40 feet. There were quite a few palms decorated like this. No wonder the Castle's annual maintenance budget is $9 million.

Too many columns?

Some of the most amazing features of the property are the pools.



Remember the movie "Sabrina" with Audrey Hepburn? The Larrabee family had gardeners to take care of the grounds, a tree surgeon on a retainer, an indoor swimming pool and an outdoor swimming pool. Well, so did the Hearst family.

The Neptune Pool

The huge outdoor pool is called the Neptune pool. It is fed by mountain water and is adorned by several statues made of marble quarried in Italy.

A sculptural group by the Neptune Pool

Despite being a century old, the statues look pristine and dazzlingly white because of the absence of air-borne pollutants that give old statues their aged look elsewhere.

The indoor pool is called the Roman pool. It contains statues of Roman gods and heroes and is styled after a Roman bath. It is decorated from top to bottom with spectacular glass mosaic tiles (smalti) from Murano, Italy.

The Roman Pool

The surrounding hills are covered with grass, green in winter when rains are plentiful, and golden-brown in the summer's dry heat. Apparently not interesting enough for Mr. Hearst who is known to have moved and planted 70,000 mature oak trees to improve the views where he thought the hills looked too bare. That's gardening on a grand scale :).