Qualla: Miramont Castle

Miramont Castle: Introduction

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nolabob, CC0. Count the architectural styles and you run out of fingers. Shingle-style Queen Anne, Romanesque, English Tudor, Flemish stepped gables, domestic Elizabethan, Venetian Ogee, Byzantine, Moorish, and half-timber Chateau -- nine distinct traditions jammed into a single 14,000-square-foot castle perched on a mountainside in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Father Jean Baptist Francolon built this place in 1895, and he did not believe in choosing just one look. The front door opens on the first floor. The back door opens on the fourth. The floors in between each have their own exit to level ground. Hardly any room has four square corners. Miramont Castle is architecture as autobiography -- the accumulated obsessions of a man who spent his life collecting ideas from every corner of the world.

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Image: Nolabob | CC0

Miramont Castle: A Priest with a Diplomat's Eye

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CaroleHenson, CC BY-SA 3.0. Francolon was born in France in 1854 into a wealthy aristocratic family. His father was a diplomat, and the young Francolon traveled widely during childhood, absorbing the architecture of Europe and beyond. He immigrated to the United States in 1878 at age 24, recruited by Bishop...

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Image: CaroleHenson | CC BY-SA 3.0

Miramont Castle: Dark Ground, New Foundations

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jiggy2016, CC BY-SA 4.0. The land beneath Miramont carries its own troubled history. The earliest deed for the property dates to 1862, and the parcel was once owned by Colonel John Chivington, commander of the infamous Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. Records show Chivington sold the land in 1867 through a s...

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Image: Jiggy2016 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Miramont Castle: The Recluse and the Empty Rooms

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jiggy2016, CC BY-SA 4.0. Despite hosting two fundraising balls at the castle in 1897, Father Francolon and his mother were considered reclusive by the local community. Then, unexpectedly, the Francolons left Manitou Springs in 1900, abandoning their furniture inside the castle they had so carefully built...

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Image: Jiggy2016 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Miramont Castle: Forty-Two Rooms and a Ghost or Two

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jiggy2016, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today Miramont Castle operates as a Victorian-era historic house museum, owned and run by the Manitou Springs Historical Society. Visitors can wander through 42 furnished rooms, each one shaped to its own purpose in Francolon's unconventional floor plan. The site includes a tea r...

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Image: Jiggy2016 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Miramont Castle: Spotting the Castle from Above

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jiggy2016, CC BY-SA 4.0. Miramont Castle sits at approximately 38.86 degrees north latitude and 104.92 degrees west longitude, at the base of the Pikes Peak Cog Railway and near the Manitou Incline. From the air, the castle's distinctive stone mass is nestled among the trees on the mountainside above Man...

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Image: Jiggy2016 | CC BY-SA 4.0