A mystery for a long time surrounded the deserted Cape Romano Dome House, which was located on the remote southern tip of Marco Island near Cape Romano, Florida. Vintage We have Beautiful Pictures of Cape Romano Dome House.
One of the strangest-looking residences in the world, the Cape Romano Dome House is located in Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands region. These abandoned structures on the remote southern tip of Marco Island in Cape Romano, Florida, have been a mystery for a while. The Cape Romano Dome Homes are currently being swallowed by the sea, moving a few centimeters closer to their watery demise every day, but the enigma behind the space-age buildings has finally been solved.
This location has an intriguing history. The history of the crumbling cluster of domes at the tip of Cape Romano is the subject of several urban legends. The space-age structures have been attributed to everything from a hidden cult to aliens. One of Florida’s most unsettling, unique abandoned homes is without a doubt the Cape Romano Dome House.
The History of Cape Romano Dome House
“With the goal of building a holiday house, Bob Lee, a now-deceased former oil producer, spent a significant portion of the years 1978 and 1979 surveying and buying land on Cape Romano. He didn’t care about the feasibility of the property he was building them on; all he cared about was having a facility that was solar-powered and self-sufficient. He constructed a full-scale replica on property he owned in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, before completing the Cape Romano Dome House. The dome house in Tennessee is still standing. Bob, Margaret, and their kids started building a vacation house near to Morgan Island in 1980.
Lee put a lot of thought into his project. It was constructed to withstand hurricane winds and other erratic weather conditions in Florida. Lee had to purchase a barge to bring building supplies to the construction site because of the isolated location. The mansion was finished in 1982 and was worth $1.5 million at the time. The rooms had white painted walls, tile or carpet on the floors, and big windows on all sides. This unusual vacation house covered 2,400 square feet in total space.
The Lees sold the home to another family in 1984, two years after it was finished. The Lees repossessed the house in 1987, and once that family’s financial circumstances deteriorated, it became their principal abode. Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992, but Lee’s dome house weathered the storm as he had expected. Nevertheless, because of the damaged windows, the interior was completely destroyed. Unfortunately, the island had already begun to change and other nearby residences had been destroyed by the time that happened. The Lee family left the Cape Romano Dome House in 1992, and it remained vacant until 2005.
The John Tosto family bought it in 2005 with the intention of remodeling it and making it usable once more. For $30,000, he acquired the Lee family’s home. Tosto intended to move the domes off of state-owned property and upgrade them to meet county construction regulations. Sadly, a few months after buying the land, Hurricane Wilma hit, further weakening the foundation of the home and eroding the shoreline. Red tape hampered Tosto’s efforts to relocate his residence to a suitable location. For the Department of Environmental Protection and the Collier County Code Building and Enforcement Departments, Tosto was unable to submit all the required permits.
After declaring the house unfit and demanding its demolition in 2007, Collier County started fining Tosto. Tosto didn’t try to demolish anything, though. Instead, the house was left unoccupied. He received a $187,000 punishment in November 2009 for failing to get the house destroyed on time. The pillars supporting the house’s foundation were submerged permanently at that time. Following Tosto, when the sea started to retake the island, the dwellings kept deteriorating. Snorkelers noticed that the Cape Romano Dome Homes were operating as a reef and attracting marine life by 2013, when they were submerged in water six feet deep.
Two of the dome-shaped homes were so severely damaged by Hurricane Irma in September 2017 that they toppled into the water. There were then only four dwellings remained. Cape Romano Dome Houses’ ownership was given to the state, who now owns it, in 2018. Fortunately, Dorian did not do any damage to the Cape Romano Dome House, which weathered the 2019 hurricane season. The abandoned domes are a perfect environment for both animals and wild mythology because there is no hope of their recovery.
Vintage Photos of Cape Romano Dome House
