Cliff Palace

Cliff Palace is the largest cliff dwelling in North America, an Ancestral Puebloan village in an alcove of Mesa Verde, Colorado, built and lived in from about 1200 to 1300. Made of sandstone, mortar and wooden beams, it has some 150 rooms and 23 kivas and is thought to have housed 100 to 120 people. Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason came upon it in December 1888 while looking for stray cattle. Damage and looting by visitors over the next decade spurred the campaign for the national park, created in 1906.