Carolusborg
The Swedish headquarters, later Cape Coast Castle. CapeCoastCastle.com.
Ghana-Net.com · Forts & Castles · Central Region · Cape Coast
For thirteen years Sweden had a colony in West Africa. Its capital was a timber-and-earth fort on a rock at Cape Coast called Carolusborg, and the stone castle that later rose on the same spot is today Ghana's most visited slave fort. The Swedish Gold Coast was betrayed by its own founder, taken by the Danes, won back, and lost for good to the Dutch and the English. Hardly anyone remembers it.
In the seventeenth century Sweden was a great power in the Baltic, and it wanted a share of the Atlantic trade. The Swedish Africa Company was founded in 1649 by Louis De Geer, a Dutch-born industrialist who had made his fortune in Swedish iron and copper. Its man on the ground was Hendrik Carloff, a trader from the Baltic who had worked on the Gold Coast for the Dutch West India Company and knew exactly how the trade worked.
Swedish in name: the ships, captains and many of the traders were Dutch or German. Like the Brandenburg venture a generation later, it was a way for Dutch money and Dutch expertise to get around the monopoly of the Dutch West India Company.
Carloff arrived in 1650 and made a treaty with the king of Fetu (Efutu), the Fante state that controlled the land around what the Portuguese had called Cabo Corso. On 22 April 1650 the Swedish Gold Coast was founded, with Carloff as its first administrator. From 1652 the Swedes built a fort on the rocky point, named Carolusborg after the Swedish king, Charles (Carolus) X Gustav.
It was modest, of timber, earth and some stone, a lodge with defences. But the site was good, and every power that followed wanted it. The English eventually rebuilt it in stone as Cape Coast Castle. The Swedish lodge lies somewhere under the castle we see today.
The Fetu connection: the kingdom that gave the Swedes their land is still celebrated every year in Cape Coast's festival, Fetu Afahye. See also Cape Coast.
At its largest the Swedish Gold Coast had half a dozen lodges along the coast. Every one of them was later rebuilt by someone else, and several are famous forts under other names.
The Swedish headquarters, later Cape Coast Castle. CapeCoastCastle.com.
A Swedish lodge that the Danes took and built into Christiansborg. Osu Castle site.
A lodge on the site of the later English Fort William. See also Castle Brew.
A Swedish post where the Dutch then built Fort Batenstein.
The Swedish lodge at Takoradi, later Dutch Fort Witsen, long gone.
A Swedish lodge at Beyin, where the English later built Fort Apollonia.
Carloff fell out with the Swedish company and left in 1655. Johan Filip von Krusenstierna became governor. Then Carloff changed sides. Sailing for Denmark from Glückstadt, he returned and on 27 January 1658 took Carolusborg and the other Swedish posts for the Danes, the beginning of the Danish Gold Coast.
The Dutch took several posts in the confusion. Carolusborg itself changed hands in local fighting, and in 1660 the Swedes were back in charge under Krusenstierna. The Danes, meanwhile, built Fort Frederiksborg on the hill at Amanful, overlooking the Swedish fort.
What the Swedes traded: above all gold and ivory, with captives a smaller part of the business than in the Dutch and English trade that followed. The castle that rose on their site became one of the great slave prisons of the coast. Read The British Arrival on the Gold Coast, 1550–1800.
The castle built on Carolusborg, with our history stories from Cape Coast.
The museum inside the castle, and what it does and does not tell.
Bookings through this widget earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. No operator has paid to appear on this page.
The Swedish Gold Coast lasted thirteen years and left almost nothing you can touch. Its story is still worth telling. It shows how the fort-building game worked: a Baltic power, Dutch money, a trader for hire who switched flags when it paid, and an African king at Fetu who sold the same land to whoever arrived. And it explains why the most famous castle in Ghana stands where it does. Visitors to Cape Coast Castle hear about the British. Almost none hear that it started as a Swedish lodge.
Verified: 28 September 2026. The 1649 company, the 22 April 1650 founding, the dates of the Swedish posts, Carloff's 27 January 1658 seizure, the governors, the April 1663 Dutch takeover, the 9 May 1664 English capture and the 1667 Treaty of Breda follow standard histories of the Swedish Gold Coast. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.