By Teresa Mariani

On a clear day, you can stand on the terrace in front of the Neptune Pool and gaze out at the Pacific Ocean, sparkling five miles and 1,600 feet below, and realize just why William Randolph Hearst chose San Simeon for his castle.

Actually, Hearst - America's original millionaire media mogul - never called it 'The Castle,' even though the main building has two towers, a rectory, a library, a great hall, and a total of 165 rooms filled with a treasure trove of art and antiques. It's surrounded by 127 acres of gardens, terraces, pools and fountains - plus three mansion-sized guesthouses.

Hearst, however, always just called it 'The Ranch." He must have had hidden knack for understatement.

A little more realistic is Hearst's official name for his estate: La Cuesta Encantada - "The Enchanted Hill." That's exactly what it was in its heyday: the 1930s, when Hearst's newspaper fortunes where running high and he entertained Hollywood's stars and starlets and America's rich and famous year-round at his hilltop estate.

Now, Hearst Castle is a California State Monument and Park, donated to the state by Hearst's estate in 1958 after his death in 1951. And it's fast becoming one of the most well known monuments in America.

"We get about 1 million visitors a year," said Lisa Anthony, public information officer at Hearst Castle. About 75 percent of them are from the United States. Another 25 percent are international visitors - mostly from Asia and Europe. The castle gets so many foreign visitors that its brochures come in a smorgasbord of languages: German, French, Korean, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Hebrew, Polish and Japanese.

The Number One Monument

In early 2000, Conde Nast Traveler magazine's international reader survey named Hearst Castle 'The Number-One Monument in the United States.'

"This reaffirms what we already know," wrote the local San Luis Obispo Tribune in an editorial touting the award. "You don't have to go to the Loire Valley or Athens or the Rhine River to see a great castle. For us, one of the all-time magnificent edificies in the world is just a short drive or even a bicycle trip from home."

Ditto for anyone who's vacationing on California's Central Coast. Whether you've been to Hearst Castle before, or you've never been, La Cuesta Encantada is always a trip.

The 165-room Castle is a gleaming white-walled Mediterranean revival-style mansion, designed in by San Francisco architect Julia Morgan largely over the course of the 'Roaring '20s.' Hearst called it the "Casa Grande" (Spanish for 'big house,' another understatement); a cathedral in Spain was the inspiration for Morgan's design.

Perched atop the pine-tipped Santa Lucia Mountains at the southern entrance to California's rugged Big Sur coast, the castle site itself offers spectacular views of the mountains, coast and ocean. Hearst loved the spot because he camped there as a boy with his family, in wooden-floored tents.

'Camping' might not be the best term for it, since the wealthy family also took along servants who had their own domestic staff tents. But after Hearst's mother died in the influenza epidemic of 1919, and Hearst inherited most of the family mining fortune at the relatively young age of 56, he began work on the castle.

Hearst hired Morgan to design the castle shortly after his mother's death, and the duo spent the next 28 years creating and filling the hilltop palace.

A Palace of Fine Arts

As a result of Hearst's vast fortune and penchant for art and collecting, he was able to fill his castle with more than 22,500 museum-quality artifacts.

Hearst bought everything from antique ceilings from Spain to ancient Greek vases and sculptures dating back as far as 500 B.C. to rare oriental carpets. Much of Hearst Castle's artwork and artifacts are 13th and 14th century southern European pieces.

Most of the luxurious art items were shipped from around the world to Hearst's pier in the cove below the castle - what's now San Simeon State Beach. The treasures sat in a warehouse there - it's still standing - until there was room for them in the ever-growing Castle. Hearst brought in the steel, iron, cement and beams used to build the castle by steamer to San Simeon, too. The construction materials were hauled up the steep 5-mile grade by chain-driven trucks.

Today, art lovers and history buffs make the same trek 1,600 feet up the hill (in tour buses, not trucks). Once they reach the top, they're in for a treat on a Hearst Castle tour.

"We don't show (our artworks) in the same way a museum would," Anthony explained. "We don't show Hearst Castle as a museum. We show it as a house. You just walk in, and you're among all the artwork. It's not behind glass cases. It's there. And it's fantastic."

Though docents and tour guides do require guests to stay "on the carpet" - the approved red-carpeted walkways through the magnificent castle - the "home tour" feel is fun. It's also a field day for the imagination.

You can walk through the great assembly hall and tapestry-covered refectory (medieval for 'dining hall') and feel like you really are in a castle from the middle ages or the Renaissance.

Take the tour that includes the Neptune Pool (actually, the magnificent outdoor pool and terrace is part of all the tours) and the harem-like 'tower bedroom' where many of Hearst's movie-star guests stayed, and it's easy to imagine sunset cocktail parties with stars in tuxedoes and starlets in satin gowns, whooping it up in the 1930s - say, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, or Errol Flynn and Marian Davies.

A Small City on the Mountaintop

Now, It takes a staff of 300 to maintain the castle and it's "home tours" - from gardeners to carpenters to curators and artisans, tour guides, computer techs and parks staff - not counting the volunteer Docents who conduct many of the tours.

"We're like a small city up here," Anthony said.

The job of the castle staff "is to preserve and protect," Anthony explained. Because of that, the castle and its artworks are under constant renovation and restoration. "Right now we're doing work on the teakwood - the teak beams on the exterior," Anthony said.

Inside, there's always restoration to be done on the priceless artwork.

More, in fact, than there is in the State Parks budget for Hearst Castle. "Hearst Castle does not have an endowment fund," explained Anthony. When the Hearst Estate donated the Castle to the state in 1958, the donation did not include a fund to invest and pay for maintenance. The state took over maintaining the castle.

Over the years, the state parks department has created a visitor's center, café, gift shop and ticket sales shop just off Highway One, across from San Simeon State Beach Park. In the late 1990s, the state also added an Imax movie theater (with a screen five stories tall) at the Visitor's Center. The huge-screened National Geographic Hearst Castle Theater shows films about the creation of Hearst Castle as well as films relating to Nature and the Arts.

Raising Money to Preserve a Monument

Two volunteer groups have formed to raise money to further restoration and renovation at Hearst Castle: the Hearst Castle Preservation Foundation ( www.hearstcastle.org ) and Friends of Hearst Castle ( www.friendsofhearstcastle.org ).

If you fall in love with Hearst Castle, you might want to check out membership in one of the groups. The Friends of Hearst Castle group hosts an annual October cocktail party and dinner on the Neptune Pool terrace, overlooking the ocean. Members get a chance to buy tickets at $175 each. And for the first time, in December 2000, the Friends will host a fund-raising dinner held inside the Castle dining room.

"That's a first," Anthony said.

If the dinners are a bit beyond your price range, the tours shouldn't be. Daytime tours range from $5 for children to $10 for adults; evening tour prices are $10 and $20. To make reservations, call Reserve America at 1-800-444-4445. . To make reservations on-line, head to the Reserve America website at www.park-net.com. Tours do fill up, so reservations are recommended, but you can purchase tickets at the Visitor's Center on a walk-in basis

To read up on Castle history and displays or check out maps and directions to Hearst Castle, try the Hearst Castle Preservation Foundation website at www.hearstcastle.org.

Anthony and the Castle staff are currently in the process of creating an official Hearst Castle State Park website. Check back at TheSLOGuide for an address and link to the site when it's up and running.

And in the meantime, put on your walking shoes and head to Hearst Castle. Tours cover as much as half a mile, and include 150 to 400 stairs. (Tours for the disabled are also available by special arrangement).

The Castle is well worth the hour or more of walking - but you won't want to do it in high heels.

Teresa Mariani is a freelance writer based in San Luis Obispo who loves the Hearst Castle refectory.

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