The Cliff Palace is the most popular of the Mesa Verde National Park cliff dwellings to tour. The Cliff Palace tour was our second (and favorite) tour of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings. Cliff Palace doesn’t have the 32 foot ladder or sketchy path down the cliff that the Balcony House does. But, you still have to descend uneven stone steps and climb four ladders, with a total elevation change of 100 ft (30 m). You can read about all the different cliff dwelling tours on the National Park Service website page here: NPS Cliff Dwelling Tours

Cliff Palace is the largest known cliff dwelling in North America and is much more visually impressive than the other cliff dwellings we visited. The Ranger who narrated our tour said he calls it the “United Nations of the Ancestral Puebloans” because representatives from several different clans would live there at one time, in order to meet, trade, and exchange information. The Cliff Palace contained 150 rooms and 23 kivas and housed a population of approximately 100 people. The Cliff Palace was built between 1190 and 1280 CE (AD).

Cliff Palace dwellings

You can see in the layout of the dwellings that they have several kivas, which were the large underground meeting, social, and religious centers of the dwellings. And, each kiva has a set of apartments behind it where the archeologists believe the individual clans would live.

Cliff Palace kivas and apartments

Cliff Palace also has some of the most impressive architecture of the cliff dwellings that have been discovered. In particular the number and type of different structures was very impressive, ranging from large round towers to square towers to four story apartment buildings.

Cliff Palace towers

Also interesting at Cliff Palace was the line of rooms at the very top of the cliff area where archeologists believe the inhabitants would store several years of grain and other food as a hedge against drought or other bad weather.

Cliff Palace store rooms in background