Montezuma Castle National Monument, Arizona
Nestled into a limestone recess 70 feet above the flood plain of Beaver Creek in the Verde Valley stands one of the best preserved and most easily accessible cliff ruins in North America. This 5-story, 20-room cliff dwelling served as a "high-rise apartment building" for prehistoric Sinagua Indians who farmed the surrounding land between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

The Sinagua -- Spanish for "without water" -- lived in the nearby foothills and the plateau beyond the valley. Like the Anasazi, they were pithouse dwellers and dry farmers, who depended on rain for their crops. After the Hohokam abandoned the area shortly after the millennium, the Sinagua moved down into the valley and adopted the irrigation systems left by the Hohokam. By 1125, they began to build above ground masonry structures and large pueblos on hilltops or alcoves of cliffs.
Sometime after 1125, the Sinagua began building the 5-story, 20-room "castle," which stands in a cliff recess 100 feet above the valley floor. It was so well constructed that it has withstood vandalism and the elements for more than 600 years and remains one of the best preserved prehistoric structures in the deserts of the American Southwest.
The prehistoric population in this region peaked in the 1300s and remained stable for another century. Suddenly, and mysteriously, in the early 1400s the Sinagua abandoned the valley, never to return.
Early settlers to the area assumed that the imposing structure was connected to the Aztec emperor Montezuma, but this "castle" was abandoned almost a century before Montezuma was born.