The Most Remarkable Star Forts in the World

11 places in 8 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Fort Saint Elmo

   Forti Sant'Iermu

   Malta · 0.4 km from Valletta35.902° N 14.519° E

   

   Fort Saint Elmo is the star-shaped fort at the tip of Valletta's peninsula, commanding the mouths of both Grand Harbour and Marsamxett Harbour. Its fame rests on a single month in 1565: during the Great Siege of Malta its small garrison held out against the full weight of the Ottoman army for 28 days, and the time it bought is widely credited with saving the rest of the island.

   Did you know? In 1775 thirteen rebel priests seized the fort, lowered the flag of the Order and raised a banner of Saint Paul; three of them were later executed.

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2. 02 Fort of Nossa Senhora da Graça, Elvas

   Forte de Nossa Senhora da Graça

   Portugal · 16.9 km from Badajoz38.895° N 7.164° W

   

   On the summit of Monte da Graça, a bare hill about a kilometre north of Elvas, sits one of the most complete and elegant eighteenth-century fortresses in Europe. The hill had already proved its danger: in 1658, during the Portuguese Restoration War, Spanish troops besieging Elvas occupied it and could look straight down into the town. A century later Portugal decided that nobody should do so again. Construction began in 1763 under King Joseph I, directed by Wilhelm, Count of Schaumburg-Lippe, the German marshal brought in to reform the Portuguese army, and the fort was finished in 1792 and named after him, Forte de Lippe.

   Did you know? Building the fort took nearly 30 years, about six thousand workers, four thousand animals and some 120,000 gold coins.

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3. 03 Goryōkaku

   Japan · 1.4 km from Hakodate41.797° N 140.757° E

   

   Goryōkaku is Japan's great star fort: a five-pointed citadel of ramparts and water in the middle of Hakodate, designed so that each bastion covers its neighbours with gunfire. It was drawn up in 1855 by Takeda Ayasaburō, a scholar of Western learning, after Hakodate had been opened to foreign ships, and it was built to European principles of artillery defence rather than on the model of a Japanese castle. Construction took seven years and was completed in 1866, only two years before the Tokugawa shogunate fell. Inside the star stood the shogunate's magistrate's office, the government seat for the region.

   Did you know? The site was once a willow-covered marsh, which earned the fort the alternative name Yanagino-jō, "willow-field castle".

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4. 04 Bourtange

   Kingdom of the Netherlands53.007° N 7.192° E

   

   Seen from the air, Bourtange is a perfect geometric flower: a five-pointed star of green ramparts, ringed by a second star of moats, outworks and water, with a tiny village packed into the centre. The fortress was completed in 1593, during the Eighty Years' War, on a low ridge of sand running through the Bourtange Moor, a vast and nearly impassable peat bog on what is now the Dutch–German border. The name itself recalls that ridge. Whoever held it controlled the one dry road between Germany and Groningen, and the new fort helped cut off the Spanish garrison in Groningen, which surrendered in 1594.

   Did you know? William of Orange ordered the first fort here in 1580, a five-bastioned redoubt laid out by Adriaen Anthonisz, burgomaster of Alkmaar.

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5. 05 Fort Jefferson (Dry Tortugas)

   Fort Jefferson

   United States24.628° N 82.873° W

   

   Nearly seventy miles of open sea west of Key West, on a scrap of coral sand called Garden Key, stands the largest brick masonry structure in the Americas. Fort Jefferson is a huge hexagon of red brick, more than sixteen million bricks in all, with two walls about 325 feet long and four of about 477 feet, surrounded by a moat and a seawall so that the whole fort seems to float on the turquoise shallows of the Dry Tortugas. The United States began building it in 1846 to command the shipping lanes of the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida Straits. It was designed for some 450 heavy guns on two tiers of casemates and the roof; about 243 were eventually mounted, and none was ever fired in battle.

   Did you know? In 1825 the naval commodore David Porter reported that the Dry Tortugas were useless for any naval base: tiny sand islands with no fresh water.

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6. 06 Kastellet

   Denmark · 2.4 km from Copenhagen55.692° N 12.594° E

   

   Kastellet is a seventeenth-century star fort that still works for the army and doubles as one of Copenhagen's favourite parks. Its origin was St Anne's Redoubt, an outpost that King Christian IV built in 1626 to guard the harbour entrance. After the Swedish siege of Copenhagen in 1658–1660 showed how vulnerable the city was, the Dutch engineer Henrik Rüse was called in to rebuild it as a full citadel. The result is a regular pentagon with five bastions at its corners, named for the King, the Queen, the Prince, the Princess and the Count, surrounded by moats and a line of outworks. It is one of the best-preserved fortresses of its kind in Northern Europe.

   Did you know? The fortress was officially named Citadellet Frederikshavn, but almost everyone has always called it simply Kastellet, the Citadel.

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7. 07 Castillo de San Marcos

   United States · 0.5 km from St. Augustine29.898° N 81.311° W

   

   The Castillo de San Marcos is a low, pale star of stone on the shore of Matanzas Bay in St. Augustine, Florida, and the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States. Four pointed bastions, a moat and a sloping glacis give it the geometry of the classic bastioned fort, and its walls are built of coquina, a soft local stone made of countless tiny shells cemented together.

   Did you know? When Confederate militia came for the fort in January 1861, the lone Union caretaker would only hand it over in exchange for a written receipt, which he got.

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8. 08 Palmanova Fortress

   Fortezza di Palmanova

   Italy · 19.1 km from Udine45.905° N 13.310° E

   

   Palmanova is the Renaissance dream of the ideal city made real in brick, earth and water. From the ground it is a quiet town in the Friulian plain; from the air it is a perfect nine-pointed star, with three rings of fortifications, a hexagonal square at its heart and streets radiating out from the centre like the spokes of a wheel. The Republic of Venice founded it on 7 October 1593 on its exposed north-eastern frontier as a bulwark against Ottoman attack, and the date was chosen with care: it was the anniversary of the Christian victory at Lepanto in 1571 and the feast of Saint Justina, who became the town's patron.

   Did you know? The town was first called simply Palma, a symbol of victory recalling Lepanto; the 'nova' was added two centuries later under Napoleon.

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9. 09 Almeida Fortress

   Praça-forte de Almeida

   Portugal · 36.5 km from Guarda40.726° N 6.906° W

   

   Seen from the air, Almeida is a stone star pressed into the high plateau of the Beira, a dozen sharp points of wall and ravelin wrapped around a small town. It sits about seven kilometres from the Spanish border, just east of the valley of the Côa, guarding an old cross-border road, and for three centuries that position made it one of the most fought-over places in the country. A castle stood here from the Middle Ages, but the fortress you walk today belongs to a later age: work on a modern bastioned ring began in 1641, when Portugal had just broken away from Spanish rule and needed to hold its frontier, and it was only brought to completion in the late eighteenth century under the Count of Lippe, the German soldier who reorganised the Portuguese army.

   Did you know? The 1810 explosion began with a leaking powder keg that left a trail to an open courtyard door, which a French shell ignited on the evening of 26 August.

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10. 10 Naarden Fortress

    Kingdom of the Netherlands · 21.6 km from Utrecht52.293° N 5.158° E

    

    Naarden is one of the best-preserved fortified towns in Europe, and one of the few where the whole system can still be read at a glance: a small grid of streets inside a double ring of ramparts and moats, laid out as a six-pointed star on the flat, watery land east of Amsterdam. The town itself is older than its walls. It received city rights in 1300, the only town in the Gooi region to do so, and the present town was laid out around 1350. Its most terrible moment came on 1 December 1572, during the Dutch Revolt, when Spanish troops under Don Fadrique, son of the Duke of Alba, reached the medieval walls. The townspeople opened the gates in the hope of mercy; the soldiers killed around seven hundred of them, burned the town and pulled down its defences.

    Did you know? The Czech educator John Amos Comenius, often credited with inventing the school system of grades and classes, is buried in a mausoleum in Naarden.

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11. 11 Fortifications of Neuf-Brisach

    Place forte de Neuf-Brisach

    France · 32.5 km from Mulhouse48.017° N 7.527° E

    

    Seen from the air, Neuf-Brisach is a geometry lesson laid out in the fields of the Alsace plain: a perfect octagon of bastioned walls wrapped in a second, wider star of earthworks and moats, with a grid of straight streets and a great central square inside. It is the last fortified town designed by Vauban, Louis XIV's chief military engineer, and the clearest surviving expression of his ideas about how to defend a frontier.

    Did you know? Louis XIV chose the octagonal plan from three designs Vauban submitted, and the finished outline forms a sixteen-pointed star.

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