Fort Coenraadsburg
Dutch-built fort in Ghana
Fort Coenraadsburg or Conraadsburg, also Fort São Tiago da Mina, is a small fort situated opposite the Elmina Castle in the Central region of Ghana, built around a Portuguese chapel for Saint Jago, to protect Fort Elmina from attacks. Owing to its historical importance and testimony to the Atlantic slave trade, Fort Conraadsburg was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979 along with several other castles in Ghana.
History
Fort Conraadsburg was built in the 1660s. It was built on the site of a fortified chapel that the Portuguese had built and that the Dutch had burned to the ground in the Battle of Elmina (1637). The Dutch ceded the fort to Britain in 1872, together with the entire Dutch Gold Coast. Before the fort was built, the Dutch used the hill as a gun-position to bombard the Portuguese in the year 1637. To prevent others from doing the same tactic against the Portuguese, the Dutch constructed a fortified earthwork the following year
Features
In the 1660s, the then Elmina Castle Director General J. Valckenburgh changed the earthen fortification with a permanent fort made up of local sandstone and named it Coenraadsburg. The fort was built mainly for military purposes so it had no commercial warehouses. The fort was well-garrisoned so the Dutch used it as a prison for European convicts and also as a disciplinary institution for their officers who are disobedient to their laws.
Ever since the fort was transferred from the Dutch to the British, they modified the fort for the easy use of it for civilian pursuit.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Fort Coenraadsburg” is dutch-built fort in Ghana. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Fort, Coenraadsburg and Dutch-built, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “dutch-built fort in Ghana” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q478471. Authority coordinates are 5.085, -1.351. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1637 and 1872.
Modern boundaries and familiar names can conceal earlier jurisdictions or structures that do not align with the present site. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
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Contemporary maps, plans, listed-building records, estate papers and the responsible local or national archive.
Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Fort Coenraadsburg” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.