Coral Castle - Miami Florida

It was late afternoon in south Miami , and the sun, already sinking into the western sky, was bathing everything around us a pink light.

The guide stood on a block of carved coral, and in a grandiose manner, he waved his arms in order to encompass the extraordinary structure that surrounded us.

“This is Coral Castle ”, he shouted,
ensuring that the restless Japanese tourists at the back were taking it all in, “and it dates back to 1936”.

There were suitably impressed gasps from the collection of rubber-neckers as we dwelled on the possibility of anything in Miami being so old.  I tried my best to look impressed, but my thoughts flew from the stone walls, back to England and the ruins of castles that dated back to 1066.

Cowdray Castle in West Sussex was one that I had lived close to for three years and somewhere in the back of my mind
I had the dates 1520-29 which was the time it took to build. Doubtless there were teams of stone masons, workhorses, heavy wagons and a great deal of manpower. Meantime, the man who had built Coral Castle had taken twenty eight years to create this relatively small edifice. So what took him so long? The answer to that question is that he did it by himself – single handedly, and he
did it for love.

Edward Leedskalnin was born in Riga , Latvia in 1887 and by the age of 26 he was head over heels in love with sixteen year old Agnes Scuffs the only girl (...)

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