He came from Stāmeriena Parish, in eastern Latvia, the fifth son of farmers who worked rented land. In his telling, he was twenty-six and engaged to a sixteen-year-old he called his Sweet Sixteen. The night before the wedding she called it off. He left for America. The story has the simple cruelty of a folk ballad, and like most folk ballads it has been complicated by later research. Coral Castle's official literature names her Agnes Skuvst, but a Latvian account identifies her as Hermīne Lūsis instead. One investigator claimed to have found an elderly woman matching the description living in Holland, who said she had no interest in the stone village or its builder. Whichever name was real, she never came to see what he built. He built it anyway, for nearly three decades, as if the rocks themselves were a long letter she would eventually have to read.

The castle is not made of coral. It is oolitic limestone - a soft, porous bedrock that underlies most of South Florida, easy to quarry from the ground because the water table sits inches below. Leedskalnin pulled the blocks up himself, using tripods, block-and-tackle, chains, and crowbars made from scrap metal. The average stone weighs about fifteen tons. The largest weighs thirty. He had no electricity at the original site near Florida City, no truck, no crew. Around 1936, after a planned subdivision threatened his privacy, he moved the entire compound ten miles north to Homestead. He hired a truck and driver, but he loaded and unloaded the stones himself, and asked the driver not to look. He took roughly three years to complete the move. The driver, apparently, complied.

The most famous feature is the Nine-Ton Gate: a single block of stone, square, with a hole drilled perfectly through its center of gravity, balanced on an old truck bearing. When the bearing was intact, the gate swung at the lightest push. It functioned for half a century before failing in 1986, at which point a six-man crew with modern lifting equipment was required to repair what one small man had originally installed by himself. Elsewhere on the grounds: a 25-foot stone tower with his living quarters above and a workshop below; a telescope of two stones aligned to Polaris; a sundial tuned to the winter and summer solstices; chairs balanced for two and chairs balanced for one; a stone shaped like the planet Saturn; a wall of carved planets; and a rocking chair carved from a single block, smooth enough that the seat warms when you sit in it.

Asked how, he answered: leverage. Asked again, he answered: it is not difficult if you know how. He printed pamphlets on his own theories of magnetism and what he called Magnetic Current, arguing that the standard textbooks had electricity wrong. Photographs do exist of his work in progress - block-and-tackle on heavy timber tripods, exactly the equipment ancient quarrymen used to raise the standing stones of Britain and the obelisks of Egypt. The trick was time, patience, and refusing witnesses. But Leedskalnin's silence created a vacuum, and into it have poured a century of theories: antigravity, levitation, sonic resonance, knowledge of the pyramid builders. The simpler explanation - one stubborn man with a lot of dark nights and good leverage - has never been quite as satisfying as the romance of unknown forces.

Coral Castle is at 28655 South Dixie Highway in Homestead, Florida, about thirty miles south of downtown Miami and twenty-five miles north of where the Florida Keys begin. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. The grounds remain a working tourist attraction; guided tours walk visitors through the castle and demonstrate the precision of the sundial, the alignment of the telescope, and what is left of the gate's balance after later repairs. The site is smaller than photographs suggest - about an acre - and the stones are darker, weathered, and more intimate than the spectacle promises. Leedskalnin died in 1951, at sixty-four, of kidney failure, in a Miami hospital. His tools are still in the workshop. The Sweet Sixteen, whoever she was, never came.