For Mother’s Day weekend, I ended up going to Miami to see my mom. I didn’t have anything planned for Mother’s Day, except to catch up with my mom and make sure she was doing well. Of course, coming from a family full of Travel Junkies, my mom, my brother and I made our way to the Coral Castle.
At first sight, the Coral Castle looks small, but when entering through the gates of the castle, the area is much bigger than what it looks like on the outside. It was a beautiful sight, even though it is all made entirely out of coral, the way everything is sculpted is simply amazing.
The coral castle as beautiful as it is, also served a purpose. Edward Leedskalnin was a Latvian man engaged to his fiancee Agnes. A day before the ceremony, Agnes called off the wedding and left Edward with a broken heart. Ed decided to move to the U.S., where he arrived in New York. In 1922 he contracted tuberculosis. It was then that he decided to move to a state with warmer climate, which is how he ended up in Florida.
Over the next few years, Ed worked on the coral castle as a testimony to his lost love, Agnes, but the castle also allowed him to get as much sun as he needed for his tuberculosis. So what makes the Coral Castle a mystery? Well, Ed was over 5 feet tall, weighing about 100 lbs and he would move and carve the coral rocks with basic hand tools. He was a very private man, so when people would ask him how he managed to move his rocks, he would only say that he understood the laws of weight and leverage well.
These coral rocks in some areas can be up to 4,000 feet thick and though some people would see the coral carvings being moved, no one actually ever saw Ed loading or unloading the trailer. Some people believe that he had powers or that he was an alien, some say that he had connections, which would help him at night. No one really knows how these coral rocks were moved around or how he even managed to make it look like a castle with walls, which weigh 125 pounds per cubic feet. Each section of wall is 8 feet tall, 4 feet wide, and weighs more than 58 tons. How does a 5 foot man manage? Well, that is the mystery of the Coral Castle.
Although this place is pretty pricey ($50 for three people), it was still a great place to visit. Not only do you get a guided tour of the castle, but you get some neat photos of this mysterious Coral Castle.
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