Montezuma Castle National Monument

The name is wrong twice over. It isn't a castle, and Montezuma had nothing to do with it. The Aztec emperor was born after its builders had gone. European Americans named it in the 1860s, assuming that Aztecs were responsible, and the name stuck. What's actually here is one of the best-preserved cliff dwellings in North America: 20 rooms on multiple levels, tucked into an alcove high in a limestone cliff above Beaver Creek.

Construction began around 1100 CE. The Sinagua farmers who built it reached it by ladders. The cliff faces south, which kept the rooms warm in winter and cool in summer, and the height protected the building from the creek's floods. It may also have helped with communication between villages and with keeping rodents out of food stores. Unlike a European castle, it was more like an apartment building, with room for about 35 people, perhaps two or three families. The wider community here, including the dwelling known as Castle A and various pit houses, may have reached 150 to 200 people at its height.

People left the area around 1400, and nobody knows exactly why. Competition for resources, climate change and social conflict are among the possibilities, and Hopi tradition holds that these dwellings were never meant to be permanent. Today the National Park Service works with several associated tribes, including Hopi, Zuni, Yavapai and Apache, and stresses that the site is remembered rather than abandoned.

You can't go inside. Theodore Roosevelt declared this one of the first four national monuments on December 8, 1906, by which time looters had removed nearly everything of value. Early tourists climbed ladders up the cliff, but the damage ended that in 1951. Most of what you see today is original, including the timbers projecting from the wall. The visitor center plays a five-minute virtual tour of the interior that shows what the rooms look like.

The visit is short and easy. A paved, wheelchair-accessible 0.3-mile loop runs through a shaded grove of Arizona sycamores below the cliff, past the Castle and the burned ruin of Castle A, a pueblo of 45 to 50 rooms. There's a small museum, a bookstore and a picnic area by Beaver Creek. Pair the visit with Montezuma Well, 11 miles away. Rattlesnakes are common in warm months, so stay on the trail. Spring and October are the busiest times.