Blauert on Outdoors: Hearst Castle now offers a holiday twilight tour

Hearst Castle is one of California’s greatest landmarks. It’s a testament to what the imagination can do when it is virtually unconstrained by financial limits. Starting from original plans for a modest getaway, William Randolph Hearst eventually commissioned architect Julia Morgan to create a palace that crowns the top of the hill he called “La Cuesta Encantada” (The Enchanted Hill). Her beautiful buildings can be seen from miles around.

Most visitors see the Castle in daylight and in the sunny warm weather that the Central Coast is known for. Occasionally visitors get to see it in other circumstances. During one visit in the winter of 2010-2011, we saw it a downpour. Wind was dramatically bending the palm trees in every possible direction. It was strikingly different, but equally beautiful.

One of the most interesting ways to see the castle is at night. From October through December and March through May, special Evening Tours are offered. From December 19 to January 2, they become special Holiday Twilight Tours.

The buildings are decorated for Christmas as they might have been in the 1930s when Hearst and his high society guests spent extended weekends there. It’s a fun way to see the property. During these tours and the regular Evening Tours, the rooms are populated by historical reenactors in period costume. They help to bring the past to life. Having participated in most of the different tours offered at Hearst Castle, I have decided that the Evening and Holiday Twilight Tours are my favorite ways to see the Castle.

It takes some planning to make an evening visit if you live in our area. Four hours from Merced, it would be an extremely long late-night drive to get home afterwards. Fortunately, there are plenty of motel rooms available in nearby San Simeon and Cambria. There are plenty of other things to do in the area, so it’s worth making a 2 or 3 day weekend out of the trip. Later this month I’ll feature some other things to do in the area.

Because all tours are popular – both daytime and evening – it’s best to make reservations in advance. This can be done easily over the internet or by phone. For information about all the tours and to make reservations, go http://hearstcastle.org/ or call 1-800-444-4445. There are still quite a few reservations available for this season’s Evening Tours and Holiday Twilight Tours.

The Holiday Twilight Tours are 75 minutes in length. The standard Evening Tours are 100 minutes long. The regular daytime tours used to be 60 minutes long, but just last week they were extended to 80 minutes. This is an exciting change – all the tours of the property now allow visitors a longer time to enjoy their surroundings and learn about Hearst’s art collection, with no additional charge. If you attend a Holiday Twilight Tour or an Evening Tour, you’ll get to see some of the most impressive features of the property: The Casa del Mar guest house, the grand social rooms on the ground floor of the Casa Grande, and the surrounding grounds. Two Decembers ago my family met up in Cambria and one of the highlights of our Christmas-season get-together was an Evening Tour of the Castle.

During the tour we got to take a family photo in the Assembly Room. Although the lights are kept relatively low and flash photography is prohibited to protect the historic art and décor of the home, we got pretty good results with my Canon DSLR. For those of you who don’t have the equipment or don’t want to bother with the hassle, you can get even better results with the “green screen” photo taken of each group before the tour begins. The background for the nighttime tours also happens to be the Assembly Room with a giant Christmas tree. Yes, it’s a fake photo, and yes, it does cost some money, but it was worth it for us to have an excellent quality photo that recreated something we actually saw and captured with my camera (though with poorer results).

There are 3 daytime tours, each focused around a part of the property: the Grand Rooms Tour, the Upstairs Suites Tour, and the Cottages and Kitchens Tour. The Evening Tour and the Holiday Twilight Tour blend parts of each, hitting many of the highlights. All daytime tours are $25/adults, $12/children. Evening Tours are $36/adults, $18/children. The Holiday Twilight Tours are $30/adults, $15/children. Overall, the Evening Tour is my favorite because it covers the greatest extent of the buildings, but the Holiday Twilight tour is special because of the decorations and atmosphere.

Both are very enjoyable options. Docents on all tours are informative and knowledgeable.

All tours start at the visitor center located adjacent to Highway 1, just north of the town of San Simeon. Visitors ride a shuttle up to the “castle” where the tour begins. All tours include about ¾ of a mile of walking and going up and down anywhere from 159 to 332 stairs. Fortunately, for those who are unable to walk or climb stairs, special wheelchair accessible versions of each tour are also offered. You can find more information about each tour on the website.

Hearst Castle is a California landmark that blend’s Julia Morgan’s remarkable architecture and Hearst’s outstanding collection of European art and architectural elements – an icon that anyone interested in California history, art, holiday adventures, or simply exploring – should see sometime in their lifetime.

This story was originally published November 10, 2015 at 8:41 PM with the headline "Blauert on Outdoors: Hearst Castle now offers a holiday twilight tour."