My sister Susan and I made a wintertime visit to Manitou Springs, located beneath Pike's Peak, this past Sunday. The weather was in the lower 60s and sunny, and so there were quite a few visitors on the streets, although nothing like during the summer, when the round-about in the center of town always has a traffic backup. Manitou Springs, like nearby Colorado Springs, was founded back in 1872 as a tourist destination, and features healthful mineral springs that the Ute Indians once drank from. What happened to those original inhabitants I don't know, but I have an idea.
Those springs are located around the town square, seen in the photograph on the left. It is free to take the water home and drink. If it tastes really bad, that probably means it is indeed healthful. More popular with the tourists is Patsy's, a candy and ice cream stand that has been in business since 1903 and which also can be seen in the photo.
Manitou Springs has lots of old Victorian commercial buildings and homes, including Miramont Castle, which was built for a wealthy French-American Catholic priest who was once a secretary to Bishop Lamy of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The mansion, seen in the background of the photo on the right, has 30 rooms and is owned by the Manitou Springs Historical Society. Why a priest needed a 30 room mansion I have no idea, and it is said he was not especially liked in either Santa Fe or Manitou. He and his mother, who also lived in the mansion, left Manitou Springs in 1900, and the house became a tuberculosis sanitarium. After touring Manitou Springs, we headed to the Golden Bee, a British pub moved to the grounds of the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, to check it out, but not only was there no parking in the lot, but no parking anywhere near it, and so we headed back to Denver. Their loss.
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