Cliff Palace occupies a huge crescent-shaped cave on the east side of Cliff Canyon. The cave itself measures 325 feet across the front and its greatest depth is just over 100 feet. The ruin covers the entire floor of the cave and parts of it rise to the cave roof. The ancient builders made no effort to alter the cave to fit their needs. They simply made their structures conform to natural contours and when seen under certain conditions of light the houses seem almost to be part of the cliff itself.

Because of its location visitors are able to get better views of Cliff Palace than of any of the other cliff dwellings. Several points on the opposite rim of the canyon offer striking distant views and the high cliffs at each end of the cave are perfectly located for spectacular closeups.

Seen from any angle Cliff Palace is a magnificent structure and visitors sometimes have difficulty in believing that it is real. Here in the midst of a vast wilderness of canyons is this great ruin, sheltered for seven centuries by the enormous cave. It is a strange setting for the ancient city and it has an unreal quality for visitors who see it for the first time.

Baron Nordenskiold, who saw Cliff Palace in 1891, felt something of this when he told of his first view of the ruin in his book, “The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde.”

“In a long, but not very deep branch of Cliff Canyon, a wild and gloomy gorge named Cliff Palace Canyon, lies the largest of the ruins on the Mesa Verde, the Cliff Palace. Strange and indescribable is the impression on the traveler, when, after a long and tiring ride through the boundless monotonous pinon forest, he suddenly halts on the brink of the precipice, and in the opposite cliff beholds the ruins of the Cliff Palace, framed in the massive vault of rock above and in a bed of sunlit cedar and pinon trees below. This ruin well deserves its name, for with its round towers and high walls rising out of the heaps of stones deep in the mysterious twilight of the cavern, and defying in their sheltered site the ravages of time, it resembles at a distance an enchanted castle.”