Atlantic slave-fort circuit

The fortified factories of the Atlantic trade — castles and dungeons where the dead of the middle passage remain part of the architecture. Open the world map to see them plotted.

1. Bunce Island — The Slave Castle in the River

   A · Freetown region, Sierra Leone River, Sierra Leone — The best-preserved British slave-trading castle in West Africa, from which tens of thousands of people were shipped to the Americas — now an overgrown ruin CNN called a 'slave-trade ghost town'.…

2. Cape Coast Castle — The Dungeon Shrine

   A · Cape Coast, Central Region, Ghana — The largest of West Africa's slave castles, where a thousand people at a time were held in darkness beneath the governor's ballroom — and where a shrine spirit still receives ritual in the cells.…

3. Elmina Castle — Ghana's Door of No Return

   A · Elmina, Ghana — The oldest European building in sub-Saharan Africa, a 1482 Portuguese fortress whose dungeons funneled captives through the Door of No Return.…

4. Île de Gorée — The House of Slaves

   A · Gorée, Senegal — A 28-hectare island off Dakar whose pink 1776 House of Slaves and Door of No Return became the world's memorial to the Middle Passage.…