The Broadmoor

The Hotel

The Broadmoor opened in 1918, the personal project of Spencer Penrose, a Philadelphia-born mining magnate who had made his fortune at Cripple Creek and Bingham Canyon and set out, with partners Albert E. Carlton and C.M. MacNeill, to build a Rocky Mountain answer to the great European hotels. The hotel buildings are the work of Warren and Wetmore, the New York firm behind Grand Central Terminal and the early Ritz-Carltons; the grounds were laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the designer of Central Park. Penrose and his partners spent $3 million on it, roughly $42 million in today's money. It opened with a Donald Ross golf course that was then the highest-altitude course in the United States, its own private lake, and an English pub dismantled in Britain, shipped over and rebuilt on site, which still pours as the Golden Bee.

Today's property has grown from Penrose's original single building into a 784-room campus across 5,000 acres. The Main Building still anchors the property, three storeys of pink stucco around the original Italian-Renaissance courtyard, with the historic suites on the upper floors looking out over the lake to Cheyenne Mountain. The Broadmoor West and South wings were added in the 1960s and 1990s; the Cottages run along the lake edge for the multi-bedroom family booking; the Estate House (a separate multi-bedroom residence) handles the corporate-retreat and family-reunion booking at the very top of the price range. The Broadmoor's three Wilderness Experiences, the Ranch at Emerald Valley, Cloud Camp at the top of Cheyenne Mountain, and the Fly Fishing Camp on the South Platte River, are owned and operated by the resort and are reachable only as Broadmoor guests.

Correct a widely repeated error before you plan a golf trip here: the Broadmoor plays two championship courses today, not three. The East Course (Donald Ross, later reworked by Robert Trent Jones Sr.) is the historic one, where a 19-year-old Jack Nicklaus won the 1959 U.S. Amateur and where the U.S. Senior Open has been played in 2018 and again in 2025, with the championship already awarded back to the resort for 2031 and 2037. The West Course (Robert Trent Jones Sr., 1965) is the second. The third, the Mountain Course, has been closed since a 2015 rockslide and is not part of the resort's golf offer, whatever older guides tell you. Off the fairways, the Spa at the Broadmoor holds a Forbes Five-Star rating, and the resort counts 20 restaurants, cafes and lounges: the Penrose Room for the tasting-menu evening, Restaurant 1858 for steak, Ristorante del Lago for Italian, Summit for contemporary American, La Taverne for the old-guard room, and the Golden Bee, the Victorian pub shipped from England and reassembled here, which opened in 1961.

The Broadmoor has held the Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star rating for sixty-five consecutive years, the longest continuous Forbes Five-Star run of any resort in the world, a distinction the property has never had a year off from across more than six decades. The AAA Five-Diamond run is similarly unbroken. Ownership has changed hands twice without breaking the run: Penrose left the hotel to his El Pomar Foundation on his death in 1939, the Foundation sold its majority interest in 1988 to the Oklahoma Publishing Company, and the Anschutz Corporation bought the resort in 2011, running it since 2016 through the Broadmoor-Sea Island Company. For multi-generation American family bookings, for golf-focused weekends at the highest specification, for the kind of corporate retreat that needs both meeting space and a private mountain camp, there is no comparable American Rocky Mountain address.

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