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Visita Dominicana

World King Art Castle

World King Art Castle is one of the strangest places on the planet, this five-story hilltop castle in Sosúa is home to hundreds of unusual works of art, including alien-themed art, extraterrestrial messages and at least four ships as well as a sizeable collection of exotic Haitian sculptures.

Rolf Schulz, a German artist, decided at the age of 51 that he would leave his hometown of Hamburg to pursue his dream of building a castle in the Dominican Republic. And so Castillo Mundo King was born.

The artist began this labor of love in 1990 and lived in the house without electricity or running water until his death in January 2018. Before his death, he regaled visitors with stories of UFOs and extraterrestrial life. His self-built palace now doubles as an otherworldly art museum.

The castle’s five floors are filled with several hundred pieces of surreal art, including an impressive collection of sculptures by Haitian and Dominican artists (many of them exotic), as well as stone and wood carvings, paintings, and murals. Those who climb the stairs to the top floor find a reward: the view of the Bay of Puerto Plata is impressive.

The name of the museum is World King Art Castle and means ¨King´s castle´´. The structure is in an unusual architectural style. One can see Antonio Guady, the influence of the famous architect. Another – a building in an unusual Gothic Revival style or even a musk structure. Still others see in the structural curvatures of the lines some resemblance to Oskar Neymeir’s late modern Brazilian architectural style. Neymeir’s famous United Nations complex remains one of the most beautiful features of the New York City skyline.

Rolf thinks that his castle-museum has been observed by aliens, and that aliens from various planets have possibly visited his museum more than once. It surprises neither Rolf nor the museum visitors. The temples of ancient civilizations served as observatories and places to attract extraterrestrial civilizations.

Rolf Schulz’s intention to share earthly crafts with the world may reflect the so-called enigma culture of the ancient Mayan peoples that came from the Stone Age. The Mayan culture surrounded many strange contradictions and paradoxes, mystical beliefs and traditions in the course of its existence from the earliest Olmec times in 1200-1000 B.C. to the colonial period of 1500-1800 A.D. The Mayans created the Long Count Calendar in 3114/3113 BC, whose principles could be used in modern times.

They developed agriculture, irrigation systems, and complex hieroglyphic writing unknown among other aboriginal cultures. Mayan astronomy was born in the northern region of Yucatan, in the city of Chichen Itza, one of the most important places for the Mayan peoples and their traditional ways of life. There, from their observatories, the Mayan astronomers could predict the eclipses of the Sun and the Moon with remarkable precision.

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