Coral Castle is an amazing architectural feat located in Homestead, Florida. Newspapers, TV shows, magazines, and other forms of the media have compared it to the Egyptian pyramids, the temples of Greece, the Taj Mahal, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and much more. Hence its name, Coral Castle is made of hundreds of large blocks of coral rock. Some weighed up to even thirty tons! But the amazing thing about Coral Castle is that the coral was carved, moved, and set into place by the work of one, and only one, man by the name of Edward Leedskalnin.
He was extremely secretive about his work and never told anyone his secret. We do not even know how long he worked at his project because of how preciously his secret was kept. No one had really ever seen him work, so there are very many different guesses. Some say he worked twenty years, some say twenty-eight, and others say thirty. He kept himself secluded from the whole of society and had very few friends. Edward wanted nobody to see him working and often worked at night by the light of a lamp. To further protect his secret, in the year of 1936, Edward moved Coral Castle from where it was originally built in Florida City to where it now lies in Homestead. Why was this man so secretive? How did he singlehandedly build this massive engineering work?
Edward was a five foot tall, one hundred pound Latvian immigrant who was born in Riga, Latvia
on August 10 of 1887.Before he moved to Florida, Leedskalnin had lived in California, Texas, and Canada.
When diagnosed with tuberculosis, he was forced to move to somewhere warmer.
And ideally, he moved to southern Florida in 1918, where a couple he met near Florida City offered him
shelter and medical care. After his miraculous recovery, he settled down and bought an acre
of rocky land. He put it to good use building Coral Castle, although he moved it all ten miles away
to Homestead.
The reason for his building of this astounding accomplishment could be love. When he was twenty-six, Edward was engaged to Agnes Scuffs. Because she was sixteen, being ten years younger, Leedskalnin called her his "Sweet Sixteen". On the day directly preceding it, Agnes called the wedding off. Ed was said to have built Rock Gate Park, as he originally called it, for the love that he had lost.
One day in December of 1951, people saw a sign on the front gate saying that he had gone to the hospital. Edward took a bus to the Jackson Memorial Hospital located in Miami. He died three days later at the age of 64 due to malnutrition caused by stomach cancer that he had developed. His life savings of $3,500 dollars were found at Coral Castle. Edward made money from the tours of Rock Gate Park that he began giving in 1923, charging ten cents per person, and by selling pamphlets he had written. Today, Coral Castle is on the National Register of Historic Places. You can still receive tours there, but they just are not ten cents any more.
No one knows how Leedskalnin built Coral Castle without the help of other workers or modern technology. When he passed away, he took his secret with him. The only few tools he had were simple ones he made himself, his intelligence, and his own two hands.But we do have some theories...
Coral Castle consists of the castle, a courtyard, living quarters, and a tool shed. The walls of the castle
weigh about 125 pounds per cubic foot.Wall dimensions were about eight feet tall, four feet wide, and three feet
thick. Some of the awe-inspiring features located at Coral Castle include :
As the name suggests, the gate has a total weight of nine tons. It is eighty inches wide, ninety inches tall, and twenty inches wide.
The large dimensions and immensely heavy weight makes this gate seem almost impossible to open, especially if you are on your own.
But a little girl, with no help at all, could very easily open this gate with the touch of her finger. The gate would swing open
at the small pressure. And seeing that there is no hidden mechanism in this gate, Edward is a genius. He managed to balance
the coral blocks together around the perfect center of gravity. This way, anyone could open it.
Early in 1986, the gate stopped working.A crew consisting of six men and a crane removed and examined it. It was discovered that Edward had balanced the gate with an iron shaft and a truck bearing. He drilled an eight-foot hole using tools he made himself to place the iron shaft in. Leedskalnin had made an almost perfect hole without the technology we now have that can easily drill the hole. On July 23 of that same year, a duplicate gate was put in its place.