Coral Castle megalith wonder park

 Coral Castle, which has become a real tourist attraction, is a sort of park of wonders entirely made up of megaliths and stone blocks weighing several tons. How its creator, Edward Leedskalnin, managed to put this construction together remains an inexplicable mystery.

To explain the architectural wonders of the ancient world over time, the most varied theories have arisen ranging from the use of alleged paranormal powers to the use of now-forgotten techniques. In an incalculable number of books, it has been repeated so often that monuments such as the pyramids of Egypt could not be replicated even today, that such an idea is currently widespread.

Thus, the belief arose that the ancients possessed long-forgotten technological secrets. The idea of ​​resorting to esoteric knowledge dates back to the speculations that attribute the construction of Stonehenge to Merlin. A medieval painting shows us the magician who, transformed into a giant, builds that portent with his bare hands.

The hunt for Merlin's secrets has absorbed several researchers in the modern era. At the beginning of the last century, Edward Leedskalnin, one of the most bizarre protagonists of the research, proclaimed that he had rediscovered the ancient secrets relating to the processing and positioning of stones, as they were used in the construction of the pyramids and Stonehenge.

In the 1920s, Leedskalnin, abandoned by his fiancée on the eve of his wedding, emigrated to America from his native Latvia in search of fortune. After practicing the strangest trades all over the United States, he eventually settled on the southern coast of Florida wherein solitude he engaged in the construction of megaliths, an extremely bizarre activity, and built his own home using stones. of the place, a variety of rather hard coral, and lumber.

Working in secret behind a 2.5-meter high coral wall recovered on-site, Leedskalnin created a veritable stone wonderland. Using tools and contraptions made of wood and scrap metal, he sweated the proverbial seven shirts by quarrying blocks of stone weighing up to 30 tons (more than the average weight of Sarsen stones at Stonehenge).

He erected an obelisk almost 8 meters high and monoliths for the observation of the stars; he also created a cave modeled after the fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears, a huge heart-shaped table surrounded by chairs and an elaborate bedroom with two beds carved into the rock, a crib and two beds for children, in case his girlfriend one day changed her mind by deciding to marry him.

All this, in addition to many other things (for a total weight of 1,100 tons), was exclusively obtained from coral. The highlight was the entrance to the complex, a 9-ton slab, carefully hinged on its center of gravity, which opened at the slightest pressure.

After many years of solitude, Leedskalnin decided to move, as he chose a location in the immediate vicinity of the highway south of Miami, hired a tractor and, working mainly at night, dismantled, moved, and reassembled the stones in his new home, which went down in history as Coral Castle, which over time became a small tourist center.

In 1951, Leedskalnin died carrying his secret to his grave. How he managed to make Coral Castle, apparently without help, was and remains a mystery. The man was slender in build and was just one meter and 40 centimeters tall. The neighbors, interviewed several times by journalists and on television, had never seen him at work.

All attempts to spy on his activity had fallen on deaf ears: Leedskalnin seemed to have a kind of sixth sense that he felt when he was under observation. Of course, there was talk; the most absurd of which was that Leedskalnin sang to the stones, which somehow made them lighter.

It is more reasonable to assume that he had a set of chains and pulleys powered by the engine of his old Ford. But even so, it's hard to believe that he could have brought Coral Castle to life all by himself. The engine of the car would only provide him with the manpower equivalent to some assistant's performance.

Leedskalnin did not let out anything about his activity accept the fact that he claimed to have rediscovered ancient techniques based on a system of levers and counterweights; he also wrote a series of pamphlets on the general importance of magnetism, which seem almost completely meaningless, at least from the point of view of conventional physics, but which naturally gave rise to inferences that Leedskalnin would have invented some contraption to overcoming the force of gravity-based precisely on magnetism.

In the 1960s, the golden age of so-called alternative archeology (and for all sorts of bizarre speculations), antigravity or levitation were often proposed as methods used by prehistoric builders to lift and place stones. Numerous books and articles claimed the existence of unknown forces on the surface of the Earth that the ancients were evidently able to dominate in order to levitate and transport huge masses of stones.

Others argued that the trick was in ultrasound: Acoustic levitation is indeed possible, provided that large enough speakers are used to move sufficiently small objects. However, despite all the hypotheses, no experiments were carried out to verify whether with any of those methods it was possible to move small, or even large, blocks of stone.