Fort Vernon was a military structure designed to facilitate the

Atlantic slave trade The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of Slavery in Africa, enslaved African people to the Americas. European slave ships regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Pass ...

. The

Royal African Company The Royal African Company (RAC) was an English trading company established in 1660 by the House of Stuart and City of London merchants to trade along the West African coast. It was overseen by the Duke of York, the brother of Charles II of Eng ...

built the fort in 1742 near Prampram, a town in the

Greater Accra Region The Greater Accra Region has the smallest area of Ghana's Regions of Ghana, 16 administrative regions, occupying a total land surface of 3,245 square kilometres. This is 1.4 per cent of the total land area of Ghana. It is the List of Ghanaian re ...

Ghana Ghana, officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It is situated along the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, and shares borders with Côte d’Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, and Togo to t ...

. It was built out of cheap materials – rough stones and swish. The Danes destroyed the fort before 1783. The British rebuilt it in 1806, but it soon started to collapse and was abandoned in about 1816. It was re-occupied by the British in 1831 but was again abandoned in 1844. It subsequently became ruins. Because of its importance during the slave trade and its testimony to European economic and colonial influence in West Africa, the fort was inscribed on the

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and International secur ...

World Heritage List World Heritage Sites are landmarks and areas with legal protection under an international treaty administered by UNESCO for having cultural, historical, or scientific significance. The sites are judged to contain "cultural and natural heritag ...

in 1979, along with several other forts and castles in Ghana. Fort Vernon 8.jpg, Ruins of Fort Vernon Fort Vernon 7.jpg, Remains of Fort Vernon, Back view

References

{{coord missing, Ghana Castles in Ghana Vernon