Castle Rock is a part of the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, CO metropolitan statistical area and the Front Range urban corridor.

White settlers were drawn to the area by rumors of gold and by land opened through the Homestead Act of 1862.

Castle Rock was founded in 1874 when the eastern Douglas County border was redrawn to its present location.

Men employed by the Works Progress Administration constructed a star atop the butte shortly after Castle Rock received that donation.

[10] The original Douglas County courthouse was one of seven buildings in Castle Rock that have been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

A dispute about whether the Castle Rock Police Department was required to enforce a civil restraining order was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005.

The case had arisen from a 1999 murder of three young girls by their father outside the Castle Rock Police Department building.

[11] The mother had asked the Castle Rock police to enforce the restraining order by finding and apprehending the father after he removed the children from her home and before the murders.

[14] The town lies a few miles east of the Rampart Range of the Rocky Mountains on the western edge of the Great Plains.

[17] Other prominent landforms visible from Castle Rock include Dawson Butte, Devils Head, Mount Blue Sky, and Pikes Peak.

East Plum Creek, a stream within the South Platte River watershed, flows generally north through Castle Rock.

[19] The hillsides are covered with meadows of grass, small plants, scattered juniper trees, and open ponderosa pine woodlands.

Local wildlife includes the American badger, American black bear, bobcat, coyote, Colorado chipmunk, crow, garter snakes, gray fox, mountain cottontail rabbit, mountain lion, mule deer, pocket gopher, porcupine, skunk, and tadpoles.

[1] Lying within the Front Range urban corridor, the town is part of the greater Denver metropolitan area.

[22][23] Other nearby communities include Franktown to the east, Larkspur to the south, Perry Park to the southwest, and Sedalia to the northwest.

[22] Castle Rock has a semiarid climate (Köppen BSk) with cold, dry, snowy winters, and hot, wetter summers.

[31] One reason for this is that the town has not yet attracted the variety or extent of employers needed to significantly lower the number of commuters to work outside Castle Rock.

The three industries employing the largest proportion of the working civilian labor force were educational services, health care, and social assistance (15.5%); professional, scientific, and management, and administrative and waste management services (13.2%); and finance and insurance, and real estate and rental and leasing (12.6%).

[36] Castle Rock voters approved a change to the town charter that authorized an at-large mayor in 2017.

The Miller Library includes archives and local history and offers several educational and recreational programs to the public.

Colorado State Highway 86, an east-west route, enters Castle Rock from the east, then turns north and west as Founders Parkway, terminating at its junction with I-25 at Exit 184.

[47] For local transportation within Castle Rock, the town government sponsors a voucher program for reduced-fare taxi service.

BNSF Railway and Union Pacific Railroad each have a freight rail line that runs through Castle Rock.

The 50-bed hospital offers comprehensive health care to the Douglas County area, with labor and delivery suites, NICU, orthopedic surgery, ICU, and medical imaging.

Radio station KJMN is licensed to Castle Rock, but broadcasts from Denver playing a Spanish adult hits format on 92.1 FM.

[59][60] Denver radio station 850 KOA, which broadcasts a news/talk and sports format, operates its 50,000-watt transmitter from a site 10 miles northeast of downtown Castle Rock, in the town of Parker.

Castle Rock is also served by the AM signal of KGNU, a noncommercial affiliate of PRI, Pacifica, and the BBC World Service, and which also provides diverse music programming.

The park is named after a local banker and philanthropist, who with his wife Jerry, left trust monies to Castle Rock in the mid-1990s.

[64] The Castle Rock Historical Museum is in the former Denver and Rio Grande Railway depot building on Elbert Street.

The star remains lit from the week before Thanksgiving to the end of the National Western Stock Show in January.