São Jorge da Mina
The headquarters of the Portuguese Gold Coast for 155 years, and a UNESCO World Heritage site today.
Ghana-Net.com · Forts & Castles · Central and Western Regions
For 170 years Portugal held a monopoly on Europe's trade with the Gold Coast. It came for gold, built the first European fortress south of the Sahara, and paid for the gold partly with enslaved Africans shipped in from elsewhere. Then the Dutch took everything in five years. This is the hub for every Portuguese fort, captain and story on Ghana-Net.
In 1469 King Afonso V of Portugal leased the exploration of the Guinea coast to the Lisbon merchant Fernão Gomes, on condition that he push a hundred leagues further each year. In January 1471 two of his captains, João de Santarém and Pêro Escobar, reached the coast near Shama and found what Europe had been looking for since the Sahara caravans first brought West African gold north: people who traded gold on the beach.
Not a discovery. The Akan gold trade was centuries old. It ran north through Bono and Begho to the Mande traders and across the Sahara. What the Portuguese did was open a second door, by sea, and try to lock it behind them.
King John II wanted the trade protected by stone. In 1482 he sent Diogo de Azambuja with a fleet carrying pre-cut stone, timber, masons and some 600 men. At the rock peninsula beside the village the Portuguese called Aldeia das Duas Partes, Azambuja met the local ruler, Kwamina Ansa, remembered in Portuguese as Caramansa.
The Portuguese account preserves his answer: the traders should keep coming and going as before, because friends who meet only now and then stay friends. Azambuja built anyway. When his men broke a rock the local people held sacred, fighting broke out. Within weeks the first fortress of São Jorge da Mina stood: Elmina Castle, the oldest European building in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1486 the settlement received a town charter.
A famous visitor: Christopher Columbus later wrote that he had sailed to São Jorge da Mina, a decade before his voyage to the Americas. See our dedicated site, ElminaCastle.info, online since 2007.
Gold. The trade at Mina was a royal monopoly, run from Lisbon, and in its best decades it sent large quantities of gold to Portugal every year, helping to pay for the voyages to India.
Cloth, linen, beads, brass and copper bracelets, pots and basins, and people. Throughout the sixteenth century the Portuguese shipped enslaved Africans into the Gold Coast, above all from the Benin region and through São Tomé, and sold them to Akan traders for gold. Many ended up as carriers and labourers in the gold fields.
The mass export of captives from the Gold Coast came later, under the Dutch and English. But the idea that people could be bought and sold at the castle was there from the Portuguese start. Read Who sold whom?
The headquarters of the Portuguese Gold Coast for 155 years, and a UNESCO World Heritage site today.
The hill above the castle with a Portuguese chapel. The Dutch placed their guns here in 1637 and later built Fort Coenraadsburg on it.
Santo António on its rock at Axim, the western trading post and the last Portuguese fort to fall.
São Sebastião at the mouth of the Pra, near where the first ships landed in 1471. Sources date it anywhere from the 1520s to 1558.
A small Portuguese post in the Ga country, near today's Osu, destroyed by the Ga in the 1570s. Nothing is left. See the forts of Accra.
The ruler who told the Portuguese to trade and leave, and could not stop the castle. See also Kwame Ansa.
The commander who built São Jorge da Mina, with Diogo Cão among the captains of the age.
The Lisbon merchant whose lease opened the coast, with his captains Santarém and Escobar.
Among the officers of the Portuguese crown on the coast, with Diogo Lopes de Sequeira.
The historian whose Décadas preserved the story of Mina, including Caramansa's speech.
Elmina itself, from A Mina, "the mine". Cape Coast from the Portuguese Cabo Corso. The whole coast was the Costa da Mina before it was the Gold Coast.
Palaver, from palavra, "word". Fetish, from feitiço, "charm", the word Europeans used for African religion, and never a compliment.
Elmina, Axim and Shama, all rebuilt by the Dutch, still stand on Portuguese foundations. The Catholic Church, which left with the Portuguese, did not return to the coast until 1880, at Elmina.
Elmina today: the town's festivals Bakatue and Edina Bronya carry five centuries of contact with Europe.
Our dedicated site on the Portuguese fort at Shama, with our own photography.
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The Portuguese did not discover the Gold Coast. They arrived at a gold trade already centuries old, forced a fortress onto a ruler who asked them not to build it, and paid for gold partly with enslaved people brought from elsewhere in Africa. They held the coast for 170 years and lost it in five, to a rival who did the same things on a larger scale. Their stones still stand at Elmina, Axim and Shama, and their words are still in English. The people who carried the gold and the captives who paid for it left no names at all.
Verified: 28 September 2026. The 1469 Gomes lease, the 1471 arrival, the 1482 construction, the 1486 charter, the forts at Axim (1515) and Accra (c. 1557–1578), the slave imports from Benin, and the dates of 1625, 1637 and 1642 follow standard histories of the Portuguese Gold Coast. Shama is dated 1526 by the GMMB and 1558 elsewhere; we give both. Caramansa's speech follows João de Barros. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.