Hearst Castle history: William Randolph Hearst, Julia Morgan, 28 years of building, the zoo, the pools, the guests, Citizen Kane and the state park

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Hearst Castle, "La Cuesta Encantada", the Enchanted Hill, stands 490 m above the Pacific at San Simeon on the central coast of California, and was built between 1919 and 1947 for the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst by the architect Julia Morgan, the first woman licensed to practise architecture in California and the first admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, who made 558 trips to the site by train and car and drew every detail of a main house of 115 rooms, the Casa Grande, in the manner of a Spanish cathedral, three guest houses, two of the most famous swimming pools in the world, gardens, terraces and a zoo, on a ranch of 250,000 acres that Hearst's father had bought in 1865; Hearst filled it with ceilings, doors, choir stalls, tapestries and statues bought in Europe by the crate, and invited the film stars, politicians and writers of the 1920s and 30s to weekends where the rules were his. It was never finished, cost about 10 million dollars, was mortgaged when Hearst's empire nearly failed in 1937, and was given to California by the Hearst Corporation in 1957; Orson Welles made it Xanadu in Citizen Kane in 1941, which Hearst tried to destroy. Below: the ranch, Hearst and Morgan, the building, the pools and the collections, the zoo and the guests, the money, the film, the park and the myths, with the era's other palaces in American house styles.

The ranch and the man

George Hearst, a Missouri miner who made his fortune in the Comstock Lode, the Homestake and the Anaconda, bought 48,000 acres of the Piedra Blanca ranch on the coast at San Simeon in 1865 and added to it until the family held 250,000 acres and 14 miles of shore, where they camped in tents on the hilltop the family called Camp Hill; his only son William Randolph Hearst, born in 1863, was given the San Francisco Examiner by his father in 1887 and built from it the largest newspaper chain in the world, 28 papers, 18 magazines, newsreels and a film studio, invented the Sunday supplement, the comic strip and the tabloid war with Pulitzer that gave the world "yellow journalism", agitated for the Spanish–American War, served two terms in Congress, ran for president, mayor and governor and lost, and inherited the ranch and 11 million dollars when his mother Phoebe died in the 1919 flu. He was 56, and he wanted a house on the hill. Hearst Castle.

Julia Morgan

Julia Morgan, born in San Francisco in 1872, took a degree in civil engineering at Berkeley, the only woman in the class, went to Paris and after three refusals was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in 1898, the first woman, and was licensed in California in 1904; she had rebuilt the Fairmont Hotel after the 1906 earthquake, designed hundreds of buildings for the YWCA and Mills College and for Phoebe Hearst, and had an office of a dozen in San Francisco when Hearst wrote to her in April 1919: "Miss Morgan, we are tired of camping out in the open at the ranch in San Simeon and I would like to build a little something." The little something became 28 years of a relationship in which Hearst sent ideas by letter and telegram, often changing his mind after a thing was built, and Morgan, five feet tall, in a tailored suit, took the train from San Francisco every weekend, 558 times by the tally, and stood on the scaffolds, ran the crews, designed the ceilings around his purchases and the pools around his whims, and never raised her voice; she kept no publicity, gave no interviews, destroyed her records, and was awarded the AIA Gold Medal in 2014, 57 years after her death, the first woman. She built 700 buildings, and this is the one.

The building, 1919–1947

• The site. A hilltop 5 miles from the sea with no road, no water and no wood; Morgan built a pier at San Simeon for the ships that brought cement, steel and the crates, a road up the hill, a reservoir fed by springs, a nursery for the gardens and a village for the crews, who numbered 25 to 150 over the years, in reinforced concrete against earthquakes and fire.
• The guest houses, 1919–24. Casa del Mar, Casa del Monte and Casa del Sol, three "cottages" of 10 to 18 rooms on the terraces below the main house, in Mediterranean Revival, so that Hearst could live in the first while the big house rose.
• Casa Grande, 1922–47. The main house, 115 rooms and 6,000 m², with a facade of two towers modelled on the cathedral of Ronda in Spain, carrying 36 carillon bells from Belgium; inside, the Assembly Room with a 16th-century French fireplace and Flemish tapestries, the Refectory, a hall 20 m long with a 16th-century Italian ceiling, choir stalls from Spain, silk banners of Siena and a table for 22 with paper napkins and ketchup bottles, the Morning Room, the Billiard Room with a Flemish hunting tapestry of 1500, the theatre for 50 where Hearst screened his own films, the Gothic Suite and Library on the third floor where Hearst lived, and the Celestial Suite in the towers; the north wing, begun in 1929, was never finished, and its rooms are bare concrete.
• The style. Spanish Colonial Revival on the outside, and inside whatever Hearst had bought: Morgan's drawings show ceilings from Spanish monasteries and Italian palazzi measured and fitted into rooms designed to hold them, with concrete walls behind.
• The stopping. Work stopped in 1937 when the money ran out, resumed in 1945, and stopped for good in 1947 when Hearst, 84 and ill, left the hill for Beverly Hills, where he died in 1951; Morgan retired the same year.

The pools and the collections

• The Neptune Pool. Outdoors, on the terrace, 32 m long and holding 1.3 million litres, faced in Vermont marble with a Roman temple front of the 1st century at one end, rebuilt three times between 1924 and 1936 because Hearst wanted it bigger, with statues by Charles Cassou of Paris; it leaked for decades and was rebuilt again in 2014–18.
• The Roman Pool. Indoors, under the tennis courts, 25 m long and 3 m deep, tiled from floor to ceiling in blue and gold Venetian glass with real gold leaf, like the baths of Caracalla, with marble copies of Roman statues and eight lamps; built 1927–34 by the tilers who took two years.
• The collection. Hearst bought about a fifth of everything sold at auction in the world in the 1920s, by one estimate, filling warehouses in New York and the Bronx with 20,000 crates: Spanish ceilings, Roman sarcophagi, Greek vases, the largest private collection of them, Flemish tapestries, medieval choir stalls, a whole Cistercian monastery from Spain, Santa Maria de Óvila, shipped in 11,000 crates in 1931 and never assembled, whose stones are in a park in Sacramento; the castle holds about 20,000 objects, from the Sekhmet statues of Egypt on the terrace, 3,500 years old, to the silver.
• The gardens. 127 acres of terraces, with 5,000 trees planted, palms, cypresses and oaks moved whole, and the mile of the Esplanade; the water came from springs 8 km away.

The zoo and the guests

Hearst's zoo, begun in 1923, was the largest private zoo in the world: 2,000 acres of fenced range with zebras, camels, bison, elk, giraffes, kangaroos, llamas, yaks and antelope wandering past the road up the hill, so that guests had to wait for the animals, and cages on the hill for lions, bears, a leopard, chimpanzees and an elephant; it was dispersed in the 1930s, and the zebras' descendants, about 120 of them, still graze the ranch and are seen from Highway 1. The guests came by train to San Luis Obispo and by car up the hill, or by Hearst's plane to the airstrip: Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Buster Keaton, Charles Lindbergh, Calvin Coolidge, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, who called it "what God would have built if he had the money", P. G. Wodehouse, and Hearst's mistress, the actress Marion Davies, who was the hostess, his wife Millicent having stayed in New York; the rules were one cocktail before dinner, no drinking in the rooms, attendance at dinner in the Refectory, where the paper napkins were Hearst's memory of camping, and a film every night, and a guest who broke them found a maid packing their bags.

The money and the film

Hearst spent, by Morgan's accounts, about 4.7 million dollars on the buildings and the rest on the collections, some 10 million in all, about 200 million today, while running 28 newspapers at a loss; in 1937 the empire owed 126 million and was taken over by a committee of creditors, who sold the collections at Gimbels in 1941, stopped the building, sold the ranch's cattle and mortgaged the castle, and Hearst lived on an allowance of 500,000 dollars a year. In the same year, 1941, Orson Welles, 25, released "Citizen Kane", whose Charles Foster Kane builds "Xanadu", a castle on a hill with a zoo, fills it with the art of Europe, keeps a mistress in it and dies alone; Hearst's papers were forbidden to mention the film, his lawyers tried to buy the negative and burn it, and the theatres that showed it were threatened, so that it made no money and won one Oscar; Hearst never said he had seen it. Marion Davies, whom the film's Susan Alexander insulted, lent Hearst a million dollars of her own in 1937 and stayed with him until he died; the film's word "Rosebud" is said to have been Hearst's private name for a part of her, which is the story Welles denied and Gore Vidal told.

The park and the numbers

• 1957. The Hearst Corporation gave the castle and 127 acres to the State of California, keeping the ranch, which it still owns and farms; the castle opened to the public in June 1958 as Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument.
• Visitors. About 750,000 a year, by ticketed tours from the visitor centre by bus up the 5-mile road: the Grand Rooms tour, the Upstairs Suites, the Cottages and Kitchen, the Designing the Dream tour of Morgan's work, and evening tours in costume in spring and autumn; the pools are seen on every tour and swimming is allowed only at charity events.
• Size. 165 rooms in all, 115 in the Casa Grande, 46 in the cottages; 127 acres of grounds; 8,300 m² of floor; 41 fireplaces, 61 bathrooms, 19 sitting rooms, 38 bedrooms, 2 libraries, a theatre, 2 pools, tennis courts and an airstrip.
• Time. 1919–47, 28 years, never finished.
• Cost. About 10 million dollars, 200 million today; the Neptune Pool's 2018 rebuild 10 million.
• Morgan's trips. 558; her fee about 70,000 dollars over 28 years.
• The zebras. About 120 on the ranch, from the zoo's herd.

Versions and theories

• Citizen Kane is Hearst. Welles said Kane was a composite; the castle, the zoo, the newspapers, the mistress, the politics and the collections are Hearst's, the loneliness is the film's, and Hearst's biographers agree the portrait was unfair to Davies and near enough to Hearst.
• Rosebud. The sled in the film; the story that it was Hearst's name for Davies's anatomy is Vidal's, and Welles, who knew, said the sled was a screenwriter's joke. Unproven, and repeated.
• Hearst stole a monastery. He bought Santa Maria de Óvila from its owner in 1931, had it dismantled and shipped, and left it in crates; Spain has since asked for it, and its chapter house was rebuilt at the Abbey of New Clairvaux in California in 2012.
• The ketchup on the table. True; Hearst kept the Refectory as a camp table with paper napkins and condiments in bottles, among the choir stalls, to remind guests they were at a ranch.
• Morgan was the "castle's architect" in name only. Every drawing is hers, 10,000 of them at Cal Poly; Hearst was the client who changed his mind, and she was the architect who built it.
• The castle is finished. The north wing's rooms are concrete shells, the facade's carving stops halfway, the bowling alley and the great hall were never built; Hearst said "it is an unfinished house, a house is never finished".

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