The Most Beautiful Castles, Palaces and Fortresses in Africa
9 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful castles, palaces and fortresses in Africa are Bab Bou Jeloud (Morocco), Bahia Palace (Morocco) and Fasil Ghebbi (Ethiopia). The list covers 9 castles, palaces and fortresses in 6 countries. Morocco has the most, with 4. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Africa's fortifications record the meeting of very different builders. Across the Maghreb, the Almohad, Marinid and Alaouite dynasties ringed their capitals with rammed-earth walls and pierced them with monumental gates of carved stone and glazed tile. In the Sahara's fringes, Berber communities built fortified granaries to guard the harvest, and in the Ethiopian highlands emperors raised stone castles that owed something to India, Portugal and Aksum at once. Palaces and battlefields complete a picture of power expressed in very different ways.
Morocco holds the richest set of gates. Bab Agnaou in Marrakesh, carved in the twelfth century under the Almohads, frames its horseshoe arch with bands of inscription in stone. Bab Mansour in Meknes, the grandest gate of Moulay Ismail's imperial city, is covered in intricate zellij tilework and incorporates marble columns taken from Roman Volubilis. Bab Bou Jeloud, the main entrance to the medina of Fez, is tiled blue on the outside and green on the inside. The Bahia Palace in Marrakesh, built by grand viziers in the late nineteenth century, spreads courtyards and painted cedar ceilings across several hectares.
Farther afield, Fasil Ghebbi in Gondar is the walled royal enclosure founded by Emperor Fasilides, with castles of brown stone and crenellated towers. Ksar Ouled Soltane in southern Tunisia and Gasr Al-Hajj in Libya are fortified granaries of vaulted cells stacked around courtyards. In Cairo, Bab Zuweila is a Fatimid gate whose towers carry the twin minarets of a later mosque, and the Isandlwana Battlefield in South Africa marks the place where a Zulu army defeated a British force in 1879.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bab Bou Jeloud | City gate | Morocco | ✓ |
| 2 | Bahia Palace | Palace | Morocco | ✓ |
| 3 | Fasil Ghebbi | Fortress | Ethiopia | ✓ |
| 4 | Ksar Ouled Soltane | Fortress | Tunisia | |
| 5 | Bab Zuweila | City gate | Egypt | ✓ |
| 6 | Isandlwana Battlefield | Battlefield | South Africa | |
| 7 | Bab Mansour | City gate | Morocco | |
| 8 | Gasr Al-Hajj | Fortress | Libya | |
| 9 | Bab Agnaou | City gate | Morocco | ✓ |
01 Bab Bou Jeloud
Morocco · 1.8 km from Fez34.062° N 4.984° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
This Photo was taken by Timothy A. Gonsalves . Feel free to use my photos, but please mention me as the author. I would much appreciate if you send me an email tagooty@yahoo.com or write on my talk page , for my information. Please contact me before commercial use. Please do not upload an edited image here without consulting me. I would like to make corrections only at my own source to ensure that the changes improve the image and are preserved. Otherwise you may upload an edited image with a new name. Please use one of the templates derivative or extract . · CC BY-SA 4.0 The older gate it replaced is still there, if you know where to look. Just to the left of the monumental arches, as you face them from outside, is a much plainer opening, closed off today, that probably goes back essentially to the twelfth century. It was a bent entrance, turning a corner inside the wall so that attackers could not charge straight through.
Did you know? With its three portals the gate deliberately imitates a triumphal arch, each horseshoe opening framed by a rectangular alfiz panel in the Moorish manner.
02 Bahia Palace
Morocco · 2.2 km from Marrakesh31.622° N 7.982° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Val Traveler · CC BY-SA 4.0 The oldest part was raised in the 1860s by Si Musa, a grand vizier who came from a family of Black servants of the royal government and rose to the highest offices of the state; inscriptions in two chambers of his garden date them to 1866–67.
Did you know? A bridge over the adjoining street once linked the palace to Ba Ahmed's private park, laid out on the site of a Saadian-era garden.
03 Fasil Ghebbi
Ethiopia · 1.1 km from Gondar12.608° N 37.470° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
FREEWALES · CC BY-SA 4.0 The complex covers about 7 hectares inside a 900-metre curtain wall pierced by twelve gates, each with its own name and purpose — the Gate of the Judges, the Gate of the Musicians, the Gate of Funeral Commemoration. Within stand Fasilides' castle, the palace of Iyasu I, the hall of Dawit III, Empress Mentewab's castle, a library and chancery built by Yohannes I, a banqueting hall, stables and three churches.
Did you know? Just south of the walls lies Adababay, the old market square where imperial proclamations were made, troops reviewed and criminals executed.
04 Ksar Ouled Soltane
Tunisia · 23.9 km from Tataouine32.789° N 10.515° E
Ian Sewell · CC BY 2.5 The ksar was built by the Berber communities of the area to keep their harvests safe, and its hilltop site made it easy to defend. Its rectangular core measures about sixty by forty metres and has a single entrance. Kamel Laroussi dates the earliest construction to 1699; an eastern extension around an outer courtyard followed before the French protectorate was established in 1881. In all there are 287 ghorfas, 96 of them around the outer court.
Did you know? Collective granaries of this type in southern Tunisia and Libya's Nafusa Mountains are generally traced back to the 14th century.
05 Bab Zuweila
Egypt · 1.4 km from Cairo30.043° N 31.258° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Marwa elchazly · Public domain The present gate was built in 1092 by the Fatimid vizier Badr al-Jamali, who rebuilt the city's mudbrick walls in stone. The name comes from the Zuwayla, a Berber tribe from the Fezzan whose soldiers were quartered here when the Fatimids founded Cairo in 969.
Did you know? The gate is also called Bab al-Mitwalli, after Mitwalli al-Qutb, a saintly figure associated with the area.
06 Isandlwana Battlefield
Isandlwana
South Africa28.359° S 30.653° E
No machine-readable author provided. RAM assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain The British had invaded the Zulu kingdom under Lord Chelmsford. On the day of the battle Chelmsford split his column and rode out with part of it, leaving the camp under Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Pulleine, joined later by Colonel Anthony Durnford — perhaps 1,800 men in all, spread out in the open without entrenchments.
Did you know? The Queen's Colour that Melvill and Coghill tried to save was lost in the Buffalo River and recovered from the water ten days later.
07 Bab Mansour
Morocco · 1 km from Meknes33.893° N 5.565° W
Jerzy Strzelecki · CC BY 3.0 Tradition credits the design to Mansour al-'Alj, a former Christian captive who converted to Islam, and the gate still carries his name. It was never really meant for defence. The horseshoe-arched opening is flanked by square bastions fronted by open loggias on thick, squat corner columns, and set into them are tall marble columns with Composite capitals that were carried here from the Roman ruins of Volubilis nearby.
Did you know? Covering a monumental city gate with colourful zellij mosaic was itself a novelty in Moroccan architecture when Bab Mansour was built.
08 Gasr Al-Hajj
Libya32.045° N 12.165° E
Jaw101ie · CC BY-SA 1.0 The granary was built in the thirteenth century, the seventh century of the Islamic calendar, by Abdallah Abu Jatla. It was designed to store the harvests of the families of the surrounding area: grain, barley and dates could be kept safe behind its walls in return for a quarter of each family's crop. The builder endowed that income as a waqf, a charitable foundation, to pay for teaching the Qur'an and Islamic learning to the people of the area.
Did you know? The chamber doors were once fastened with intricate wooden locks; all have vanished, and some have turned up in city antique shops.
09 Bab Agnaou
Morocco · 1.9 km from Marrakesh31.618° N 7.991° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
John Doyle doyler79 · CC BY 3.0 The decoration is an essay in Almohad restraint and precision. The horseshoe arch is framed by a series of concentric bands, some with radiating lines, others with interlacing lobed arches, and in the spandrels on either side there are carved shells among floral motifs. Around the whole runs a band of Quranic inscription from Surah al-Hijr, written in foliated Kufic letters whose tall stems end in small leaves.
Did you know? Its carved stone ornament closely matches two other Almohad gateways in Rabat, Bab er-Rouah and the gate of the Kasbah of the Udayas.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful castles, palaces and fortresses in Africa?
- On our list, Bab Bou Jeloud (Morocco) ranks first, followed by Bahia Palace (Morocco) and Fasil Ghebbi (Ethiopia).
- Which country has the most castles, palaces and fortresses in Africa?
- In our collection, the most come from Morocco (4), Egypt (1) and Ethiopia (1).
- What is a ksar?
- A ksar is a fortified village or granary of North Africa, typically built of stone or mud brick. At Ksar Ouled Soltane, barrel-vaulted storage cells called ghorfas are stacked up to four storeys high around courtyards.
- Was Star Wars filmed at Ksar Ouled Soltane?
- Yes. The ghorfas of Ksar Ouled Soltane appeared as the slave quarters of Mos Espa on Tatooine in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, one of several locations in southern Tunisia used by the series.
- What happened at the Battle of Isandlwana?
- On 22 January 1879, during the Anglo-Zulu War, a Zulu army of about 20,000 overwhelmed a British camp at the foot of Isandlwana hill. It was one of the heaviest defeats suffered by a British army against an indigenous force.
- How many castles, palaces and fortresses are on this list in Africa?
- The list covers 9 castles, palaces and fortresses in 6 countries. Morocco has the most, with 4.