Garden of the Gods Resort and Club

The Hotel

Garden of the Gods Club opened in 1951, four years after the Dallas oilman Al Hill and his wife Margaret bought the mesa for the view, and it spent most of its life as a private members' club rather than a hotel anyone could book. The Hill family sold to the Sunrise Company in 2007; in 2013 two long-standing members, the accounting executive Brenda Smith and the healthcare executive Judy Mackey, bought it back into local hands and renamed it Garden of the Gods Resort and Club. That change of hands is the whole story of the place: it is Smith and Mackey's wellness conviction that produced Strata, and it is the club inheritance that explains why a public resort still feels like somewhere you need to be introduced. The property turns 75 in June 2026. Note for anyone comparing the two: this is not a Broadmoor sister property, it is independently owned, and the two resorts are rivals rather than stablemates.

Accommodations are the property's central proposition: 56 rooms across the main building, 14 multi-bedroom Casita residences, and six one-to-three-bedroom cottages on the property edges, each looking either at Pikes Peak or at the red-rock formations of the Garden of the Gods national landmark next door. Standard rooms run a generous 525 square feet with full king beds, separate bathrooms with deep soaking tubs, and Pikes Peak balcony views. The Casitas are multi-bedroom residences; the six Cottages, built in 2018, are three-bedroom units with their own entrances, a shared living area and a kitchenette, which is the layout that distinguishes the property from larger conventional resort hotels. The Lodge rooms and the Grand View restaurant were rebuilt in the 2023 capital cycle.

The Strata Integrated Wellness Spa is the property's most distinctive amenity, a 5,000-square-foot integrative-medicine facility that combines conventional spa treatments with functional medicine consultations, IV-vitamin therapies, body-composition analysis, and the resort's Strata Health Optimization programmes. The Kissing Camels Golf Club operates 27 holes, the tennis operation runs four indoor courts plus outdoor courts and six dedicated pickleball courts added in 2022, and the food side is Grand View (the view restaurant, renovated in 2023), The Rocks Lounge, and the Kissing Camels Grille & Bar over at the golf club. The property's Pikes Peak terrace is the most-photographed view in Colorado Springs after the Garden itself.

Garden of the Gods Resort's central distinction is the contemporary-luxury, smaller-scale alternative it offers to the Broadmoor's historic-grand-hotel register. The 56 rooms and 20 cottages and casitas mean the property is genuinely small, it never operates at conference-resort density, and the integrated wellness programming gives the property a wellness-retreat axis that the larger Broadmoor cannot match. For the Colorado Springs anniversary that prefers Pikes Peak views over Cheyenne Mountain ones, for the solo-retreat booking that wants a smaller, quieter base, or for the wellness-driven trip that wants integrative-medicine programming alongside the standard Rocky Mountain register, this is the address.

Best Occasion Fit

Practical Information

Honest Trade-offs

No house suits every guest, and a few caveats are worth stating plainly before you book. Kissing Camels remains, at heart, a private members' club; the golf and racquet facilities serve members first, and resort guests should confirm tee and court times in advance during high season. The resort sits beside, not within, the Garden of the Gods park, so the trails and the formations are a short drive or walk away rather than at the door, and a car is effectively required for the fifteen-minute run into downtown Colorado Springs. The deliberately small key count that gives the property its calm also means a narrower spread of on-site dining and after-dark life than the much larger Broadmoor offers twenty minutes south. And the integrative-medicine programming, while genuinely the region's most serious, is priced and structured as a clinical wellness offering rather than a casual spa afternoon.

For the traveller who wants the red-rock view, the unhurried scale, and the wellness axis, none of this disqualifies the resort. For the guest who wants a full grand-hotel programme, ready golf access, and walkable variety, the Broadmoor is the better register.

Frequently Asked Questions

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