view of the garden from ed's room by earaeslehc
If you drive down US-1 toward Homestead, you’ll eventually hit a castle.
As if that wasn’t strange enough, a 5-foot man single-handedly made the entire thing out of 243 tons of massive limestone — prehistoric coral — blocks.
In the ’20s, Ed Leedskalnin fled to North America after his teenage fianceé left him at the altar in Latvia. He bought land in Florida City to build a monument to his unrequited love and spent the next 30 years building.
He made his own tools and didn’t use any heavy machinery. Like a modern Stonehenge, nobody knows how he built it. When asked, he simply said he understood the laws of weight and leverage. Researchers have studied coral castle to learn about Stonehenge and other prehistoric structures.
Coral Castle’s walls surround a courtyard speckled with engineering puzzles. He somehow carved a gate out of a 9-ton block and balanced it so perfectly anyone can open it with the push of a finger.
Inside the gate, Leedskalnin built a huge obelisk, circle of rocking chairs, heart-shaped table and observatory.
A central tower housed his living space — there’s a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and altar.
A journalist explored Coral Castle and found that it’s riddled with allusions to astronomy. Carved limestone planets along the walls are aligned with the stars.
He worked in secrecy and rejected attempts to turn his home into a tourist trap. The only time Leedskalnin used machinery was when, under pressure from developers, he relocated the entire structure to Homestead.
Nobody has replicated the positioning of the blocks without the help of cranes and other machinery. Some even resort to fringe theories of magnetism to explain Coral Castle.
