![]() ![]() Hearst's father owned the land on which La Cuesta Encantada sits, and the future tycoon spent his boyhood camping here – a far cry from the luxury this corner of San Simeon came to be known for. He also didn’t call his 165-room estate a castle, preferring its official name, La Cuesta Encantada (‘The Enchanted Hill’), or more often calling it simply ‘the ranch.’ Hearst may have been bombastic, conniving and larger than life but he was certainly not the moody recluse of Orson Welles' movie. The most important thing to know about newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) is that he did not live like Citizen Kane, the titular character of Orson Welles' film of the same name, based upon Hearst. ![]() Interior of guest bedroom at Hearst Castle, "America's Castle," San Simeon, Central California Coast © Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock Who was William Randolph Hearst? Note also that a full restoration of the famed Neptune Pool was completed in 2018, and the stunning pool is once again full of water. The estate sprawls across acres of lushly landscaped gardens, accentuated by shimmering pools and fountains, statues from ancient Greece and Moorish Spain and the ruins of what was in Hearst’s day the world’s largest private zoo – indeed, don't forget to look for zebras grazing on the hillsides of neighboring Hearst Ranch. Invitations were highly coveted, but Hearst had his quirks – he despised drunkenness, and guests were forbidden to speak of death.Ĭalifornia's first licensed female architect Julia Morgan based the main building, Casa Grande, on the design of a Spanish cathedral, and over the decades she catered to Hearst’s every design whim, deftly integrating the spoils of his fabled European shopping sprees, including artifacts from antiquity and pieces of medieval monasteries. Perched high on a hill, Hearst Castle is a wondrous, historic, over-the-top homage to material excess. From the 1920s into the '40s, Hearst and Marion Davies, his longtime mistress (Hearst’s wife refused to grant him a divorce), entertained a steady stream of the era’s biggest movers and shakers. ![]()
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