How Pueblo West earned the score
Population 33,086 (2020 Census), one of the larger communities in southern Colorado, a census-designated place governed by the Pueblo West Metropolitan District in Pueblo County at 5,033 feet of elevation.
Situation A town of 33,000 sits at the gate of Colorado’s busiest state park, Lake Pueblo, which drew about 2.9 million visits in 2024, and almost nobody arrives as a tourist.
Action Claim the reservoir story as its own, tie the McCulloch founding tale to the lake and the light, and build a visible, walkable visitor anchor to convert pass-through traffic into overnight stays.
Result A VIS of 29, the Overlooked band: world-class natural and narrative assets that are undertold and underbuilt for visitors, a starting line rather than a verdict.
A town on the lake’s edge that almost nobody visits
Drive south and west out of the city of Pueblo, past the last of the steel-town streets, and the land opens into something that feels much older than any town on it: short-grass prairie running up against sandstone bluffs, prickly pear in the ditches, pronghorn working the fence lines. Then the street grid appears, wide and rational, and you are in Pueblo West. It is home to 33,086 residents as of the 2020 Census, which makes it one of the larger communities in southern Colorado, and yet it is not technically a city at all. It is a census-designated place governed by a special district, the Pueblo West Metropolitan District, and it sits in Pueblo County at an elevation of 5,033 feet.
What makes the situation remarkable is the neighbor. Pueblo West wraps the northern and western shoulders of Lake Pueblo State Park, and that park is not a quiet local secret. It is the most-visited state park in all of Colorado. In 2024 it drew about 2.9 million visits, the highest of any park in the state system, ahead of far better-known names closer to Denver. Millions of people pass within minutes of Pueblo West every year to launch a boat, cast a line, or watch the sun go down over the water. Very few of them think of the town as a place to stay, eat, or explore. That gap, between the traffic and the awareness, is the whole story.
A planned town, not an organic one
Most American tourist towns grew up around a harbor, a mine, a rail junction, or a spring, and they accumulated their charm by accident over a century or more. Pueblo West did not. It was drawn on paper, all at once, by a developer who had never set foot on most of the land he was selling. That origin is unusual enough to be an identity in its own right, and we will come back to it, because the man who drew it is one of the more colorful characters in twentieth-century American real estate.
Turn proximity into a reason to stop
When a town already sits beside a magnet that pulls in millions, the work is different from a place starting cold. Pueblo West does not need to manufacture a draw. The draw is here: the water, the light, the open country, the room to breathe that the Front Range corridor to the north has mostly paved over. The task is narrower and, frankly, more achievable. It is to give the 2.9 million people already in the neighborhood a reason to turn off the highway, a story to remember the place by, and somewhere to point a camera that says Pueblo West rather than just Colorado.
In Visitor Impact Score terms, this is a town that is rich in raw ingredients and thin in packaging. It scores 29, which places it in the Overlooked band. That is an honest number and it should be read as a starting line, not a verdict. A high-desert reservoir town with a one-of-a-kind founding story and a state park doing nearly three million visits a year is not short on potential. It is short on a told story, a walkable core, and the kind of signage and lodging that turn a drive-by into an overnight.
The founder also bought the London Bridge and moved it brick by brick
Pueblo West was the creation of Robert P. McCulloch (1911 to 1977), an industrialist who made his first fortune in chainsaws. The McCulloch chainsaw was a household name, and the cash it threw off bankrolled a second act as one of the boldest land developers in the American West. His most famous stunt is almost too good to be true: in 1968 his company bought the original London Bridge, the granite span that had carried traffic across the Thames, and shipped it 5,300 miles to Arizona, where it was reassembled stone by numbered stone at Lake Havasu City, a town McCulloch also built from nothing.
Pueblo West was cut from the same cloth. McCulloch Properties developed it alongside Fountain Hills, Arizona, and Spring Creek, Nevada, all of them planned communities conjured onto raw desert land. To sell Pueblo West, McCulloch ran a “Fly to See” program, flying prospective buyers in for free to walk the empty rangeland and imagine a city. That a single visionary with a chainsaw empire and a relocated bridge to his name drew this town on blank prairie is the kind of ownable, true, slightly improbable story most destinations would pay dearly to have. Pueblo West has it for free.
The assets already on the ground
The reservoir is the engine
Everything starts with the water. Lake Pueblo was created when the Bureau of Reclamation built Pueblo Dam across the Arkansas River between 1970 and 1975 as part of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, and the state park opened in 1975. The result is a genuinely big body of water in a dry land: roughly 4,600 surface acres, around 60 miles of shoreline, and close to 10,000 acres of surrounding park land. For a region that averages little rain, that much navigable water within a short drive of the town center is the single most valuable tourism asset Pueblo West has, and it is the reason the park posts the visitation numbers it does.
Liberty Point is the picture
If the reservoir is the engine, Liberty Point is the postcard. It is the highest point in Pueblo West, a sandstone overlook reached by driving south on Purcell Boulevard until the pavement ends, and from its bluff the view opens across Pueblo Reservoir to Greenhorn Mountain and the Wet Mountains beyond. Photographers come for the sunsets, which over high desert and open water turn genuinely cinematic, and a short paved trail drops toward the edge where pronghorn and birds of prey work the early and late hours. A flag snaps on the point. It is the closest thing the town has to a signature image, and the hero photograph at the top of this page was made there.
The high-desert setting is the differentiator
Colorado’s tourism brand is built on alpine peaks and ski towns, which means the high-desert benchland around Pueblo West reads as something different and quieter: warmer, drier, less crowded, with enormous skies and a horizon you can actually see. Prickly pear, twisted juniper, and red rock give the place a Southwestern texture that surprises visitors who expect snow-capped postcard Colorado. For a traveler tired of trailhead parking lots full to overflowing, the open country here is not a consolation prize. It is the point.
How a desert town got 60 miles of shoreline
Pueblo West did not happen to be built next to a lake. The lake and the town arrived together, by design, in the same handful of years. McCulloch’s company started selling lots in 1969, and the federal government began raising Pueblo Dam in 1970. By the time the dam was finished in 1975 and the reservoir filled, the young community on the bluffs above it suddenly had a recreational front yard most desert towns can only dream of.
The water itself is part of one of the most ambitious water projects in the West. The Fryingpan-Arkansas Project moves water from the wetter western slope of the Rockies through tunnels under the Continental Divide to the dry eastern plains, and Lake Pueblo is one of its principal storage reservoirs. So the boats, the fishing tournaments, and the sunset crowds at Liberty Point all sit on top of a feat of mid-century engineering that made farming, drinking water, and recreation possible across a huge swath of southeastern Colorado.
Room to grow on purpose
Because Pueblo West was platted as 26,830 acres meant to hold 60,000 people, it has something most established tourist towns have run out of: space, and the legal framework to plan it. The original ambition was vast. By 1974 the community already had more than 2,000 residents and its first elementary school, and it has grown steadily since toward the population it carries today. A town designed from a blank sheet can still decide, deliberately, where a walkable visitor district, a lakeside lodge, or a signed scenic loop should go. That is a planning advantage older towns would envy.
Where the score stands today
Put the pieces together and the Visitor Impact Score comes to 29, which sits in the Overlooked band (provisional, an online audit). The number is low, and it should be. Pueblo West today reads, to a passing traveler, as a residential community rather than a destination. There is no concentrated, walkable downtown of the kind that anchors a Durango or a Salida. Lodging, dining, and visitor signage are thin relative to the volume of people already moving through the area for the lake. The town’s biggest single asset, the reservoir, is officially a state park, which means much of the recognition and branding accrues to “Lake Pueblo State Park” rather than to Pueblo West itself.
None of that is a knock on the place. It is a precise description of an opportunity. The score measures how well a town currently converts its raw potential into a visitor experience, and on that measure Pueblo West is leaving a great deal on the table. The honest read is that the inputs here, a record-setting park, an iconic overlook, a singular founding story, and rare open space, are far stronger than a 29 would suggest in isolation. The score is low because the packaging is missing, not because the place is.
The single biggest opportunity
If Pueblo West did one thing, it would be this: claim the reservoir story as its own and build a visible, walkable visitor anchor to hold it. Right now the town is adjacent to one of Colorado’s great outdoor draws and yet largely invisible inside it. A clearly branded gateway, a compact district near the water with food, lodging, and a reason to linger, and a told story that ties the McCulloch origin to the lake and the light, would let Pueblo West capture a real slice of the millions of visits happening on its doorstep. The traffic is already here. The town simply has not introduced itself.
The honest opportunity
Pueblo West is a rare kind of hidden gem, the kind whose raw materials clearly outrun its current reputation. It has a one-of-one founding tale: a chainsaw magnate who relocated the London Bridge also drew this town on empty rangeland and flew strangers in to sell them the idea. It has Colorado’s most-visited state park as a literal next-door neighbor, with nearly three million visits a year and 60 miles of shoreline. It has Liberty Point, an overlook that does for Pueblo West what a single great viewpoint does for towns that have learned to market one. And it has the high-desert openness that the crowded Front Range can no longer offer, plus the planned-community advantage of space and the power to shape it on purpose.
The Visitor Impact Score of 29 says, plainly, that almost none of this has been turned into a visitor experience yet. We read that as the most exciting thing about the place. The distance between what Pueblo West is and what it could be is wide, well understood, and entirely closable with the right story, the right anchor, and a decision to be a destination. That is exactly the kind of work that rewards a deliberate, creative approach, and exactly why this town belongs in the book.
Related reading: how Thomas Dambo’s trolls turned Detroit Lakes into a tourism and economic boost, a flagship example of one idea building a visitor economy.