Atalaya: A Scholar's Spanish Dream on the South Carolina Shore
Near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
Just off the highway at Murrells Inlet, behind the dunes of Huntington Beach State Park, stands one of the stranger houses on the American Atlantic coast. Atalaya , the name means watchtower in Spanish , was built between nineteen thirty-one and nineteen thirty-three as the winter home of Archer Milton Huntington and his wife, the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington.
Archer Huntington was, by the standards of American wealth, an unusual figure. His fortune came through his adopted father, a railroad baron, but Archer spent his life not accumulating capital but translating medieval Spanish literature, endowing Hispanic museums, and building institutions dedicated to the cultural heritage of Spain. When Anna was diagnosed with tuberculosis and doctors prescribed time in a warm coastal climate, Archer designed the house himself, drawing on the Moorish coastal fortresses he had studied throughout Spain.
The result is unlike anything else in South Carolina. Thirty rooms arranged in a square around an open central courtyard, with a forty-foot tower , functioning as a water tower , rising from the northeast corner. No architectural firm, no professional aesthetic of the period. Just one man's vision of a Spanish watchtower transplanted to a South Carolina barrier island.
Anna used the studio space extensively. She was already famous for her equestrian sculptures and for the massive Diana of the Chase she had completed years earlier. At Atalaya she continued her work with large-scale animals, and several pieces she cast here are now displayed at Brookgreen Gardens across the highway , the sculpture garden the Huntingtons built on what had been four former rice plantations.
After Archer died in nineteen fifty-five and Anna in nineteen seventy-three, Atalaya fell into disrepair. The state of South Carolina acquired it and opened it to the public. The building is now on the National Register of Historic Places, weathered but intact , the strangest, most specific castle on the Gullah Geechee coast.
