Montezuma Castle NM
— — a room left high in the cliff.
Not only on a wall.
“A five-story Sinagua dwelling set into a limestone alcove a hundred feet above Beaver Creek, in the Verde Valley north of Phoenix. The name is wrong twice over — neither Montezuma's nor a castle — but it stuck after Anglo settlers in the 1860s mistook the rooms for Aztec work. The Sinagua built it between about 1100 and 1425, then left. The path along the creek runs through Arizona sycamores so tall they hide the cliff until you turn the last bend, and the dwelling appears already there, the way the people who climbed to it must have meant it to.
Montezuma Castle NM, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Montezuma Castle National Monument sits in the Verde Valley near Camp Verde, in Yavapai County, Arizona, about 90 miles north of Phoenix off Interstate 17. The dwelling is a 20-room masonry structure built into a limestone cliff alcove roughly 90 feet above Beaver Creek. It was constructed and occupied by the Sinagua, an ancestral Puebloan culture, between about 1100 and 1425 CE. President Theodore Roosevelt named it one of the first four National Monuments in 1906 under the new Antiquities Act, on December 8.
The walls are coursed limestone and river-cobble masonry set in mud mortar, with sycamore beams supporting the floors. The alcove that holds the building is a natural recess in the Verde Formation limestone, sheltered enough that much of the original woodwork survives in place — unusual for a six-hundred-year-old structure in the open Southwest. Entry to the interior has been closed since 1951, after foot traffic began damaging the floors; the trail today loops along the creek below and the dwelling is read from the ground. About 350,000 people walk it each year, by NPS counts.
The visitor center sits at 2800 Montezuma Castle Highway, off Exit 289 from Interstate 17. The paved loop trail is a third of a mile and accessible. The monument is open daily, typically 8:00 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., with the standard NPS entrance fee. Montezuma Well, the second unit eleven miles to the northeast, is included with the same ticket and is the quieter of the two. Spring and fall are the easier seasons; midsummer afternoons in the Verde Valley reach the high nineties.