Elmina Castle

Elmina Castle, first called São Jorge da Mina (St George of the Mine), stands on a rocky spit of land separating the Benya lagoon from the Atlantic in the town of Elmina, on the coast of modern Ghana. The Portuguese built it in 1482 to control the gold trade of what Europeans came to call the Gold Coast. It is the oldest surviving European building in sub-Saharan Africa, and over nearly four centuries of Portuguese and then Dutch rule it became one of the main stations of the Atlantic slave trade.

Portuguese ships trading for the Lisbon merchant Fernão Gomes reached this coast in 1471 and found a busy gold trade already in place. The settlement, then a village of perhaps a few hundred people, lay on the border between the states of Eguafo and Fetu. In 1481 King John II of Portugal, wishing to protect a trade he now held as a royal monopoly, sent a fleet under Diogo de Azambuja carrying cut stone and other building materials. It arrived in January 1482.

Azambuja negotiated with the local ruler, whom the Portuguese called Caramansa and later tradition names Kwamina Ansa. The ruler was wary of a permanent European neighbour and agreed only reluctantly, after gifts and implied threats. When the builders began quarrying a rock that local people held sacred and pulling down houses, fighting broke out, several Portuguese were killed and the Portuguese burned the village. Even so, much of the work went quickly, and the fort, a rectangular castle with corner towers, was soon complete. Azambuja became its first governor.

The fort became Portugal's headquarters in West Africa, from which the Portuguese Empire controlled its whole Gold Coast trade. Gold shipments to Lisbon rose from about 8,000 ounces over the years 1487 to 1489 to 26,000 ounces around 1500. The Portuguese brought enslaved people from Benin and elsewhere along the coast to Elmina, where they were exchanged for gold carried down from the interior; one estimate puts their number at ten to twelve thousand between 1500 and 1535. With Portuguese backing, Elmina also broke away from its neighbours to become a small state of its own.

The Dutch attacked the castle repeatedly, beginning in 1596, and failed each time until 1637. That year a Dutch West India Company force of nine ships, with African allies from Eguafo and Asebu, seized the hill of St Jago overlooking the castle and bombarded it until the garrison surrendered at the end of August. The Dutch made Elmina the capital of their Gold Coast possessions, took the remaining Portuguese posts by 1642 and built Fort Coenraadsburg on the hill to guard the castle from inland.

By the seventeenth century the trade of the region centred on captives, most of them taken in the interior and sold by African traders at the coast. The castle served as a holding depot where enslaved men and women were confined before being shipped across the Atlantic, and the Dutch continued the trade until 1814, when they abolished it under a treaty with Britain. After 1701 the Asante Empire became Elmina's powerful ally, receiving regular payments from the Dutch for the town.

Once the end of the slave trade had made its Gold Coast forts unprofitable, the Netherlands handed them to Britain in 1872. Many of Elmina's people refused to accept British authority, and the Asante king objected to the transfer, which helped bring on the war of 1873 to 1874. In June 1873 British warships bombarded the old town beside the castle, and the British then razed it and forbade rebuilding on the peninsula. Elmina became part of the British colony of the Gold Coast, and the castle passed to independent Ghana in 1957.

The castle was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, together with the other forts and castles of the Ghanaian coast, because of their role in the slave trade. The Ghanaian government restored it extensively in the 1990s, and it is now preserved as a national museum. Its so-called Door of No Return stands as a symbol of the millions taken into slavery through such forts, and many African Americans visit as a pilgrimage to their ancestral past. In 2006 the Zamani Project recorded the building in detail with 3D laser scanning.