The Most Curious Places in the United States
5 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most curious places in the United States are Palace of Fine Arts, Bishop Castle and Grotto of the Redemption. The list covers 5 curious places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The United States has always made room for the eccentric builder: the self-taught visionary, the patron with a single obsession, the world's fair that leaves one building behind. Its curious places are often one-person projects carried on for decades, or grand gestures that outlived their purpose and became beloved in their own right.
The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, designed by Bernard Maybeck for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, is a classical rotunda and colonnade set beside a lagoon, rebuilt in concrete in the 1960s. Bishop Castle in the mountains of Colorado has been built almost single-handedly by Jim Bishop since 1969, with stone towers, iron bridges and a dragon-head chimney. The Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa, begun by Father Paul Dobberstein in 1912, is a series of grottoes encrusted with minerals, shells and semi-precious stones. Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley places large modern sculptures across open fields and wooded hills.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Palace of Fine Arts | Folly | |
| 2 | Bishop Castle | Folly | |
| 3 | Grotto of the Redemption | Folly | |
| 4 | Storm King Art Center | Sculpture garden | |
| 5 | House on the Rock | Folly |
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 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.
04 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.
05 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 the United States?
- On our list, Palace of Fine Arts ranks first, followed by Bishop Castle and Grotto of the Redemption.
- Why was the Palace of Fine Arts rebuilt?
- It was built in 1915 as a temporary exhibition hall of wood and plaster. Because San Franciscans wanted to keep it, it was reconstructed in permanent materials in the 1960s.
- What is the Grotto of the Redemption made of?
- It is built from concrete inlaid with rocks, minerals, petrified wood, shells and gemstones gathered from many places. Father Paul Dobberstein worked on it for more than four decades.
- How many curious places are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 5 curious places.