Cape Coast Heritage Trail

About this pack

A 7-day premium trip to Cape Coast, Ghana, taking in Cape Coast Castle, Elmina Castle, Kakum canopy walk and Assin Manso river site.

Inside the Cape Coast Heritage Trail trip

Cape Coast Heritage Trail opens at Cape Coast Castle, one of about forty so-called slave castles built along West Africa's Gold Coast by European traders. Originally established in 1555 as a Portuguese trading post named Cabo Corso, meaning "Short Cape," the site passed to the Swedish Africa Company in 1653, when Hendrik Caerloff built a timber fort here named Carolusborg after King Charles X of Sweden; control changed hands repeatedly among Swedish, Danish, Dutch and eventually British interests over the following decades. By the 18th century the castle's underground dungeons, cut into the rock beneath the parade ground and estimated to date to around 1682, were used to hold captives during the Atlantic slave trade — described by the French traveller Jean Barbot as vaulted cellars able to "conveniently contain a thousand Blacks" — before they were shipped across the Atlantic through what came to be known as the castle's final gateway to the ocean. Cape Coast Castle, along with the other forts and castles of Ghana, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List for its testimony to the Atlantic gold and slave trades.

A short distance along the coast stands Elmina Castle, also called Fort St. George, built by the Portuguese in 1482 as Castelo de São Jorge da Mina and the oldest surviving European building anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa. Constructed from prefabricated materials shipped from Portugal aboard ten caravels under the command of Diogo de Azambuja, the fort was raised with the agreement of the local Fante chief Kwamin Ansah and initially served the gold trade that made the coast famous, with as much as 680,000 grams of gold exported annually from the region at its height in the early 16th century. The Dutch West India Company seized the fort from the Portuguese in 1637 and took over the entire Portuguese Gold Coast five years later, continuing the slave trade here until 1814; the fort passed to British control in 1872 before Ghana's independence in 1957, and it is recognised by UNESCO alongside Cape Coast Castle for the same reason.

Inland, the route continues to Kakum National Park, a 375-square-kilometre tract of tropical forest first protected as a reserve in 1931 and gazetted as a national park only in 1992, notable as one of the few parks in Ghana established at the initiative of local communities rather than the state wildlife department. Kakum is one of only three places in Africa with a canopy walkway, a 350-metre structure connecting seven treetops that gives visitors access to a forest canopy home to the Diana monkey, the giant bongo antelope and, as of 2012, the densest population of forest elephants recorded anywhere in Ghana; BirdLife International has confirmed 266 bird species here, including the globally threatened white-breasted guineafowl, alongside more than 600 recorded species of butterfly.

The trail closes at Assin Manso, a town on the Cape Coast–Kumasi highway some 40 kilometres inland, known for the role it played as an inland slave market during the same trade that filled the dungeons of Cape Coast and Elmina. Captives brought from the interior were traded here before making the final stretch of the journey to the coastal castles, and the Assin Manso Slave River Site today preserves that history at the riverbank where, according to tradition, enslaved people were bathed and inspected before continuing on to the Atlantic ports — a sober close to a route that has already carried the traveller through two of West Africa's oldest and most historically weighted European fortifications and a community-founded rainforest reserve.

• Cape Coast Castle — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Elmina Castle — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Kakum National Park — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Assin Manso — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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