Montezuma Castle

A few miles northwest of Las Vegas, in the canyon of the Gallinas River, a Queen Anne hotel with turrets and a tower stands out of the pines above a set of hot springs. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe built its first Montezuma Hotel here in 1881 and ran a spur line to its door, with a Fred Harvey dining room inside. It was the first building in New Mexico with electric light, and it had an elevator and mineral water piped in from the springs.

It burned, was rebuilt, burned again, and in 1886 a third hotel opened on the site under the name the Phoenix, though nearly everyone went on calling it the Montezuma. It never paid its way. When the railroad opened the Castañeda beside the Las Vegas depot in 1899, the resort lost its reason to exist, and it closed on October 31, 1903. A Baptist college used it from 1922 to 1931, and then it stood empty for half a century.

In 1981 Armand Hammer bought the castle and the land around it for a new school, the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West, now UWC-USA, the only United World College in the country, founded with help from Prince Charles. The school could not afford to save the building at first, and it went on decaying until the National Trust listed it among the country's most endangered historic places in 1997. A restoration costing more than $10.5 million, finished around 2001, brought it back as a residence hall and meeting space.

The castle is open to the public only on occasional guided tours. Along the road below it, the hot springs run into small rock-lined pools that have long been used for soaking.