Carved into the cliffs of Mesa Verde (which means “green table” in Spanish,) in southwest Colorado, more than 4,700 ancestral Puebloan dwellings stand as silent testament to a culture that prevailed there for some nine hundred years. But it was only in the final hundred years or so that the people known as cliff dwellers would move down off the mesa top and carve the 600 stone shelters for which they became known.
Mesa Verde National Park was established by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 to “preserve the words of man,” and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978. later in 1906, President Roosevelt recognized four additional sites “of the greatest ethnological value and scientific interest.” Montezuma Castle, 345 miles from Mesa Verde, was one of them.
Sculpted within a white limestone cliff above Beaver Creek in Arizona’s Verde Valley, Montezuma’s Castle is a beautifully preserved five-story, 20 room cliff dwelling of the Sinagua people. Living there from about 1200 to 1400 AD, then disappearing as quickly as the Puebloans of Mesa Verde, the Sinagua left an enduring but fragile record that still echoes beauty and mystery.
Several of our national park tours and vacations include Mesa Verde National Park. Vacations choices for the national parks include bus tours, train trips, hiking, biking, river rafting and family tours.
