The Most Curious Places in North America
6 places in 2 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most curious places in North America are Palace of Fine Arts (United States), Bishop Castle (United States) and Las Pozas (Mexico). The list covers 6 curious places in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 5. Last updated 14 October 2026.
North America's most curious places are often the work of one stubborn imagination. Without centuries of inherited ruins, the continent's eccentrics built their own: a priest setting stones into grottoes for decades, a man raising a castle alone with his own hands, a patron of surrealism planting concrete dreams in the jungle, and world's fairs that left behind a ruin made to look ancient.
The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, designed by Bernard Maybeck for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, is a classical rotunda built to evoke a Roman ruin beside a lagoon. Bishop Castle in Colorado has been built by Jim Bishop single-handedly since 1969, with a dragon's head on its facade. Las Pozas in Xilitla, Mexico, is Edward James's garden of surreal concrete towers and staircases in the rainforest. The Grotto of the Redemption in Iowa sets minerals and semi-precious stones into a series of grottoes, and Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley spreads large modern sculptures across open fields and hills.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Palace of Fine Arts | Folly | United States | |
| 2 | Bishop Castle | Folly | United States | |
| 3 | Las Pozas | Sculpture garden | Mexico | |
| 4 | Grotto of the Redemption | Folly | United States | |
| 5 | Storm King Art Center | Sculpture garden | United States | |
| 6 | House on the Rock | Folly | United States |
01 Palace of Fine Arts
United States · 4.8 km from San Francisco37.803° N 122.448° W
Kevin Cole ( en:User:Kevinlcole ) · CC BY 2.0 The exposition's palaces were built to be demolished, framed in wood and finished in staff, a mix of plaster and fibre. Almost all of them came down; this one was so loved that a preservation league, led by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, formed while the fair was still running. The flimsy materials crumbled all the same, and by the 1950s the imitation ruin had become a real one.
Did you know? The curving pergola around the rotunda stretches for about 340 metres, framing the lagoon on one side.
02 Bishop Castle
United States38.062° N 105.094° W
Matt Trush · CC BY-SA 3.0 Everything about it feels improvised and grand at once. Walls are built from rocks gathered from the surrounding mountainside, arched windows open onto the forest, and ornamental ironwork — much of it forged by Bishop himself — runs up the towers as spiral stairs, catwalks and narrow bridges that sway out into the air between spires.
Did you know? Bishop was a high-school dropout who ran an ornamental ironworks business in Pueblo, the skill behind the castle's metal stairs and bridges.
03 Las Pozas
Mexico · 26.5 km from Tamazunchale ♤21.397° N 98.997° W
MyName (Bernardo Bolaños) · CC BY 2.5 James came to Xilitla in 1945 with his friend and guide Plutarco Gastélum, bought land around the pools and began by growing orchids, at one point some 29,000 of them. When a rare frost killed the orchids in 1962 he turned to building instead, and for more than two decades until his death in 1984 he employed scores of local workers, carpenters and mould-makers to cast his visions in reinforced concrete.
Did you know? Carpenter José Aguilar turned James's sketches into wooden moulds, into which concrete was poured to cast the garden's flowers, columns and arches.
04 Grotto of the Redemption
United States42.964° N 94.446° W
Ben Franske · CC BY-SA 4.0 It is the life's work of one man. Paul Matthias Dobberstein, born in Rosenfeld, Germany, in 1872, trained at St. Francis Seminary in Wisconsin, where he built a first small grotto to Our Lady of Lourdes, and was ordained in 1897. Local tradition holds that, falling gravely ill with pneumonia, he vowed to build a shrine to the Virgin Mary if he recovered.
Did you know? The 'sky' of the Christmas Chapel is made largely of blue azurite and green malachite, two copper minerals that usually occur together.
05 Storm King Art Center
United States · 32.7 km from Poughkeepsie41.425° N 74.059° W
Eldan Goldenberg · CC0 It began modestly. In 1958 Ralph E. Ogden, retired from his family's Star Expansion Company, bought an estate at Mountainville, and in 1960 opened it to the public, at first with the idea of a museum for Hudson River School painting and a few small sculptures he had bought in Europe. The turning point came in 1967, when he acquired thirteen works from the estate of David Smith.
Did you know? Noguchi hoped visitors would climb into Momo Taro's hollowed centre and sing or make noise there, to hear how the stone answers.
06 House on the Rock
United States43.100° N 90.136° W
Ruscoe · Public domain The original house on the rock is intimate and dark: exposed stone, low ceilings and dark woodwork, with echoes of the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Taliesin estate is nearby. A popular story claims Jordan built it to spite Wright; the House on the Rock itself firmly disputes it. The most famous single room is the Infinity Room, added in 1985, which later appeared in a film dream sequence alongside the carousel.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most curious places in North America?
- On our list, Palace of Fine Arts (United States) ranks first, followed by Bishop Castle (United States) and Las Pozas (Mexico).
- Which country has the most curious places in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (5) and Mexico (1).
- Who created Las Pozas?
- The British poet and patron of surrealism Edward James built it from the late 1940s until his death in 1984, filling a jungle hillside in Xilitla with concrete structures inspired by surrealist art.
- Why was the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco built?
- It was built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Its original plaster structure was rebuilt in permanent materials in the 1960s.
- Who built the Grotto of the Redemption?
- Father Paul Dobberstein, a Catholic priest in West Bend, Iowa, worked on it from 1912 until his death in 1954, setting stones collected from many countries into its walls.
- How many curious places are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 6 curious places in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 5.