When it was founded
Accounts give different years for the founding. A trading post at Akwida probably came first, with the fort following within a year or two. This page gives the mid-1680s rather than pretend to a precision the sources do not have.
Header Photo - at Richter Fort Osu, Accra
Ghana-Net.com · Western Region · Ahanta West · Akwida
Brandenburg's second fort on the Gold Coast, named after a German electress who never came near it. Taken by the Dutch, handed back, sold, and left to the sea. Today it is little more than foundations in a fishing village near Cape Three Points — and almost nobody, even locally, can tell you what it was.
If you come to Akwida expecting a fort, you will be disappointed. There is no whitewashed tower, no gate, no ticket office. What survives of Fort Dorothea is low stone walls and foundations, overgrown and built around, in a village whose life is fishing and coconuts rather than history.
That is exactly why it belongs on this site. It is the second of only two German forts ever built in what is now Ghana. The first, Groß Friedrichsburg at Princes Town, still stands on its hill a short way west. Dorothea did not survive, and with it went most of the evidence that Brandenburg ever tried to hold more than one point on this coast.
An honest warning. This is a site for people who care about the history, not for a day out. Combine it with the beach at Akwida, Cape Three Points and Princes Town, and it is worth the detour. On its own, it is a ruin you will need someone local to find.
Brandenburg arrived on this coast in the first days of 1683 with two ships, a treaty with the Ahanta, and ambitions far larger than its resources.
After raising their flag at Princes Town, the Brandenburgers wanted a second post to widen their trade along the Ahanta coast. Akwida, east of Cape Three Points, was the choice. The fort was established in the mid-1680s — small, lightly built and thinly manned.
It was never secure. The Dutch, who treated this whole coast as theirs and Brandenburg as an intruder, took Fort Dorothea in 1687 and held it until 1698. Brandenburg got it back, but by then the enterprise was already failing: ships came rarely, money ran short, and the posts survived by trading with whoever turned up.
When Prussia gave up its Gold Coast possessions and sold them to the Dutch from 1717, Dorothea went with them. The Dutch had little use for it. Unlike Groß Friedrichsburg, where the Ahanta ruler John Conny held out for seven years, there is no dramatic last chapter here. The fort was simply abandoned, and the weather and the village did the rest.
What it was for. Like every fort on this shore, Dorothea traded in gold and in people. It was small, and the Brandenburg trade was modest next to the Dutch or the English — which does not make it innocent. For the scale of the trade these forts served, see The Forgotten Giants of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Who Sold Whom.
Brandenburg named its forts after the ruling family. Groß Friedrichsburg honoured Frederick William, the Great Elector. Fort Dorothea honoured his second wife, Dorothea Sophie, Electress of Brandenburg.
She never saw the Gold Coast, and it is unlikely many people in Akwida ever knew whose name the fort carried. A fishing village in the Ahanta country still has, under its houses and palms, the foundations of a building named after a princess from northern Germany. It is one of the odder footnotes of European ambition on this coast.
For a German reader this is worth pausing on. Most Germans assume their colonial history in Africa starts in the 1880s with Togo and Cameroon. It starts here, two hundred years earlier, in Princes Town and Akwida.
Very little has been written about Fort Dorothea, and what exists often contradicts itself.
Accounts give different years for the founding. A trading post at Akwida probably came first, with the fort following within a year or two. This page gives the mid-1680s rather than pretend to a precision the sources do not have.
The village appears as Akwida, Akwidaa and older European forms such as Accada. They are the same place, east of Cape Three Points in Ahanta West.
Some pages describe Fort Dorothea as if it could be visited like Elmina. It cannot. What remains is fragmentary, unprotected and unrestored, and it is shrinking.
West on the Takoradi–Tarkwa road to Agona Nkwanta, the junction for the Ahanta coast, then south towards Dixcove and on west to Akwida. Allow an hour and a half or more; the last stretch is slow, and slower in the rains.
Trotro from Takoradi to Agona, then a shared taxi towards Dixcove or Akwida. Transport on the last stretch is irregular. Agree the fare and a waiting time, and do not pay the return leg in advance.
Princes Town and Egyambra crocodile pond to the west, Dixcove to the east, and Cape Three Points in between.
Akwida has beach lodges of its own, and Busua and Dixcove are close. Options on ghanahotels.biz; flights into the country on ghanaflights.info.
The regional capital is Sekondi-Takoradi. Akwida is best done as part of an overnight stay on the Ahanta coast, not as a day trip — and never from Accra.
For the record. Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, 2 Barnes Road, Adabraka, Accra: +233 302 221633 or +233 302 221635. If you visit and find the remains damaged or built over, tell us — we would rather document it than let it disappear unnoticed.
No tour we know of goes to Akwida — for this site you arrange your own transport. The castle tours below cover Cape Coast and Elmina, and work well as the first leg of a trip that carries on west.
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The Ahanta and Nzema coast carries more forts per kilometre than almost anywhere else in Ghana, and hardly any of them see visitors.
Brandenburg's headquarters, still standing on its hill — and the fort the Ahanta ruler John Conny held against the Dutch for seven years after Prussia sold it.
Above the fishing harbour at Dixcove, and one of the strangest stories on this coast — leased to a British private individual in the 2000s, prompting a dispute about who can hold a World Heritage site.
Where the Dutch signed a treaty with the Ahanta in 1656 that held until 1872 — one of the longest-standing agreements between a European power and an African state anywhere.
Portugal's second fort on the Gold Coast, on a rock at the edge of Axim. Taken by the Dutch in 1642.
The westernmost fort in Ghana, now a museum of Nzema history — and the starting point for the Nzulezu stilt village.
A shrine near Princes Town where a priest calls wild crocodiles out of the water and feeds them. Not a fort, and the best reason to stay on this coast a second day.
All of them, in order: Forts and Castles of Ghana — the complete directory. The lighthouses of this coast, including Cape Three Points: Western Region Lighthouses.
There is not much to see at Fort Dorothea, and this page will not pretend otherwise. What there is, is a fact most people have never heard: Germany's colonial story in Africa began here, on a beach near Cape Three Points, two centuries before Berlin carved up the continent.
Stay on the Ahanta coast, see Groß Friedrichsburg first, then ask someone in Akwida to show you what is left of the second German fort. Photograph it. In another generation there may be nothing left to photograph.
Verified: 26 September 2026. The Dutch occupation of 1687 to 1698 and the sale of the Prussian Gold Coast possessions to the Dutch from 1717 follow standard reference accounts of the Brandenburg-Prussian Gold Coast. The founding year is given as the mid-1680s because the sources differ. The state of the remains is described in general terms; report changes to us. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.