THE ENCHANTED CASTLE OF THE HEARST FAMILY.

The Hearst Castle is now a National and California Historical Mansion located on the Central Coast of California, United States.
 It was designed (between 1919 and 1947) by Julia Morgan, an architect, for the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. She was the daughter of Charles Bill Morgan, a mining lover but not a successful man. Her family wealth relied on Albert O. Parmelee, a cotton trader and self-made millionaire, father of Eliza Morgan, her mother. She ran the household with a strong hand, providing young Julia with a role model of womanly competence and independence.
Julia designed more than 700 buildings in California for institutions serving women and girls (YWCA, Mills College) during a long and prolific carrier. She was the 1st woman to be admitted to the L'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the 1st woman to be licensed as an architect in Califonia State.
The Castle was built on Rancho Piedra Blanca that George Hearst, father of William, originally bought in 1865, at the age of 45. William grew fond of this site over many childhood family camping trips.
The Region in which the land is located is sparsely populated because of the Santa Lucia Range in coastal central California abuts the Pacific Ocean, providing dramatic seaside vistas but few opportunities for development and transportation.
William inherited the Ranch, which had grown to 1012 km2/250,000 acres and 23 km/14mi of coastline, from his mother Phoebe in 1919, at the age of 56. Although the large Ranch already had a Victorian mansion, the location selected for the "Enchanted Castle" was undeveloped, atop a steep hill whose ascent was a dirty path accessible only by foot or on horseback over 8 km/5mi of cutbacks. William particularly admired a church in Ronda, a city in Spanish Province of Malaga and asked Morgan to pattern the Main Building towers after it. Construction began in 1919 and continued through 1947.
The estate is a work of visual art of historic architectural styles that William admired in his travels around Europe, but its underlying structure is primarily steel reinforced concrete. A private power plant supplied electricity to the remote location. Most of the estate's chandeliers have bare light bulbs, because electrical technology was so new when the Enchanted Castle was built. Morgan devised a gravity-based water delivery system that transport water from artesian wells on the slopes of Pine Mountain, a 1100m/3500ft hugh peak 11km/7mi East of the Castle, to a reservoir on Rocky Butte, a 610m/2000ft knoll less than a mile SouthEast from the Castle.
William was a prolific buyer and built his home to get his bulging collection out of warehouses. This led to incongruous elements, such as the private cinema, whose walls were lined with shelves of rare books. The floor plan of the Main building is chaotic due to his habit of buying centuries-old ceilings, which dictated the proportions and decor of various rooms.
The Castle featured 56 bedrooms, 61 bathrooms, 19 sitting rooms, 0.5 km2/127 acres of gardens, indoor and outdoor swimming pools (The Neptune Pool features an ancient Roman temple front, transported wholesale from Europe and recosntructed at the site), tennis courts, a movie theater, an airfield, and the world's largest private zoo.
Invitations to the Great House were highly coveted during the 1920s and 1930s. The Hollywood and political elite often visited, usually flying into the estate's airfield or taking a private Hearst-owned train car from Los Angeles. Among Hearst's guests were Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, the Marx Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, James Steward, Bod Hope, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, Dolores del Rio, and Winston Churchil. While guests were expected  to attend the formal dinners each evening, they were normally left to their own devices during the day while Hearst directed his business affairs. Since the Great House had so many facilities, guests were rarely at a loss for things to do. The estate's theater usually screened films from Hearst's own movie studio, Cosmopolitan Productions.
William R. Hearst (April 29, 1863-August 14,1951) responsible for the building of the "Enchanted Castle," was born in San Francisco, to George Hearst (September 3,1820-February 28, 1891) of Scots-Irish origin. George, his father, was the son of a farmer which operated 3 mortgaged lands and a local store with the help of slaves. His father supplemented the gaps of his formal education by observing how the local mines were exploited, and reading information about minerals and mining. Eventually this love for mining became his main goal in live and the source of income as a prospector during a time in which the gold rush was on. He enter as a partner of Tevis (banker and capitalist who served as president of Wells Fargo from 1872 to 1892), Hagging (American attorney, rancher, investor and major owner/breeder of  Thoroughbred Horse Racing), Hearst (prospector using self mining education and experience) Corporation, a company that started in California in the 1850s. They had interests in the Comstock Lode and the Ophir mine in Nevada, the Ontario silver mine in Utah, the Pacific mine in Pinos, Altos, New Mexico, the Homestake gold mine in South Dakota (his pursuit of which is dramatized in the HBO (Home Box Office, the cable flagship division of Time Warner, in New York) television series "DeadWood' depicted as a ruthless and borderline sociopathic robber baron, in season 3), the Anaconda Copper mine in Montana, and the source of their immense fortune was Cerro de Pasco, silver mine in Peru. After the Cerro de Pasco continuing exploitation the Corporation grew to be the largest private mining firm in the United States.
In 1860, at the age of 40, he married a girl of 18, neighbor of his mother's home town in Missouri. They moved to San Francisco, and his wife, gave bird to their only son, William Randolph Hearst.
William's life story was the main inspiration for the development of the lead character in Orson Well's film "Citizen Kane."
When William's father died in Washington DC, his mother donated a great deal of his fortune to help found new libraries at several and now very prestige universities. The Hearst Mining Building on the Berkeley campus is dedicated to his memory. George Hearst character is portrayed in the 1964 episode "The Paper Dynasty" of the syndicated western television series "Death Valley Days," hosted by Stanley Andrews.
The "Enchanted Hill" as William used to call it, was built on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean near San Simeon, which is home to a large Northern Elephant Seal Rockery, known as White Stones Rookery in central California, halfway (400km/250mi from both) between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The estate itself is 8 km/5mi inland atop a hill of the Santa Lucia Range at an altitude of 490m/1600ft.
It was donated to the state of California in 1957, and is now a State Historical Monument and a National Historic Landmark, open for public tours. It has a considerable collection of art and antiques.