It took several lottery cycles before we were able to get tickets to tour Tovrea Castle, a Phoenix landmark. These tour tickets are described as “harder to get than a permit to hike to Havasupai Falls or a night at Phantom Ranch at the bottom of Grand Canyon.” I’m happy to say it was worth the extra time and effort!

Tovrea Castle, sometimes referred to as the Wedding Cake Castle, is on the National Register of Historic Places. 

This part of downtown Phoenix was once harsh desert.  Homesteaders owned the property and were attempting to eke out a livelihood . 

Italian immigrant, Alessio Carraro, purchased 277 acres and went to work building a castle. It was intended as a boutique luxury hotel.  Carraro wanted to host people to interest them in purchasing the luxury homes he intended to build on his land. The castle and surrounding homes were to be known as Carraro Heights.

Carraro, and his son Leo, used whatever materials were available while building their castle hotel.

They used a discarded safe from a local bank to hold valuables and be the wine cellar.

The kitchen cupboards were made of teller cages from the same bank.

The Carraros developed a cactus garden with cacti from all over the world.  (Over time, only cactus from the local area survived.)

Father and son took 14 months to build the hotel structure and surrounding grounds. Carraro’s plans were derailed by the Great Depression and odors from the surrounding stockyards owned by Edward A. Tovrea.  Tovrea ran the largest stockyard in the world encompassing 200 acres of holding pens and processing 400,000 head of cattle a year.

Alessio Carraro sold his castle to E.A. Tovrea in 1931. E.A. and his second wife, Della, moved into the castle. They lived mostly in the basement as there were no heating or cooling systems. The stairs going down were quite steep.

E.A. died a year later and his son, Phillip, took over the stockyard business. Della maintained the castle.

Della married Prescott publisher Bill Stuart and they lived in the castle seasonally.

The bathroom was on the main floor where there were six to eight guest rooms.  The only shower was on the second floor where two suites shared another bathroom. The top floor was a copala.

The couple entertained in the castle and on the grounds.

Della expanded the castle grounds including a reflecting pool surrounded by a rose garden.  She built an aviary to house peacocks and other birds.

After Stuart’s death, Della lived full time in the castle by herself.  As she aged, Della moved onto the main floor.   

One night eighty year old Della was robbed by two men.  There was a tussle over a gun. (A bullet hole remains in the kitchen ceiling.)

Della eventually loosened her bindings and tried to call for the caretaker.  

When her caretaker didn’t respond, she walked down to his cabin for assistance. Della came down with pneumonia shortly after and died.

One of the robbers was caught but Della died a couple of months before any of her property was recovered.  She had lived in the castle for 40 years.

After Della’s death, various family members and caretakers lived in the castle over the next decades. The building and grounds suffered from lack of maintenance.

Beginning in 1989, the City of Phoenix passed a series of bonds to purchase the landmark and rehabilitate the castle and grounds. The city and volunteer efforts took more than 20 years.

Currently, The Tovrea Carraro Society is responsible for conducting tours and maintaining the castle and grounds.  The society began offering tours in 2012 and there was huge demand. The lottery system was adopted post COVID.

We were able to tour the basement where Della and her husbands lived. There are a variety of historic exhibits about the castle and its people.

One of the most interesting aspects of the basement was the ceiling plaster. There are a few birds eggs (plaster) hidden in the plaster. We saw them but I didn’t get a picture.

The society is trying to raise money to rehabilitate a few of the outer buildings.  Many were felled by a microburst in 2015.

The former well house fared better.

We very much enjoyed our tour of Tovrea Castle!

While on the tour, we could see the nearby Stockyards Restaurant, connected in its history to the castle.

That meant we needed to go there.

The Stockyards was the original Phoenix steakhouse.  Opening in 1947, the restaurant became a gathering place for cattlemen, politicians and bankers.  

When it burned down in 1953, it was remodeled by Helen Tovrea.  Helen was the wife of Phillip Tovrea, then the owner of the cattle stockyards, meat packing company and Tovrea Castle at Carraro Heights. 

Thanks to friends, Nancy and Mark, for joining us on the Stockyards field trip! The food was delicious and the experience was very nice.

The other Phoenix castle we toured is the Phoenix Mystery Castle.  We visited in 2023 without having to win the lottery first, or even have advance reservations.  If you would like to read about that castle, it is the blog PHX: Mystery Castle.