The Most Remarkable Star Forts in Europe
8 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable star forts in Europe are Fort Saint Elmo (Malta), Fort of Nossa Senhora da Graça, Elvas (Portugal) and Bourtange (Kingdom of the Netherlands). The list covers 8 star forts in 6 countries. The Kingdom of the Netherlands has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The star fort was Europe's answer to the cannon. Tall medieval walls shattered under gunfire, so from the late fifteenth century Italian engineers lowered and thickened them and projected angled bastions outward, so that every stretch of wall could be swept by fire from its neighbours. The new system, known as the trace italienne, spread across Europe through the wars of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and produced towns and fortresses whose plans read from above like geometric stars.
Palmanova in northern Italy, founded by Venice in 1593, is an ideal city laid out inside a nine-pointed star, its streets radiating from a central square. Neuf-Brisach in Alsace, the last work of Vauban, is an octagonal new town planned at once with its fortifications. In the Netherlands, Bourtange is a village inside a five-pointed star of ramparts and moats, and Naarden is wrapped in a double ring of bastions and water. Kastellet in Copenhagen is a pentagonal citadel that still serves as a military post.
The southern forts were built for real sieges. Fort Saint Elmo in Malta held out against the Ottoman army for about a month in the Great Siege of 1565, buying time for the rest of the island. On the Portuguese frontier, the Fort of Nossa Senhora da Graça crowns a hill above Elvas, whose fortifications form the largest bulwarked dry-ditch system in the world, and Almeida Fortress lies within a six-pointed star of bastions whose castle was destroyed when its powder magazine exploded during the French siege of 1810.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fort Saint Elmo | Star fort | Malta | |
| 2 | Fort of Nossa Senhora da Graça, Elvas | Star fort | Portugal | |
| 3 | Bourtange | Star fort | Kingdom of the Netherlands | |
| 4 | Kastellet | Star fort | Denmark | |
| 5 | Palmanova Fortress | Star fort | Italy | |
| 6 | Almeida Fortress | Star fort | Portugal | |
| 7 | Naarden Fortress | Star fort | Kingdom of the Netherlands | |
| 8 | Fortifications of Neuf-Brisach | Star fort | France |
01 Fort Saint Elmo
Forti Sant'Iermu
Malta · 0.4 km from Valletta35.902° N 14.519° E
John Haslam · CC BY 2.0 The point was watched from the early 15th century, and the Aragonese raised a watchtower here in 1488, dedicated to Saint Elmo (Erasmus of Formia). After an Ottoman fleet sailed unopposed into Marsamxett in 1551, the Knights of St John replaced the tower from 1552 with a proper star fort designed by the Spanish engineer Pietro Pardo. In the siege of 1565 around 150 knights and 600 soldiers defended it under relentless bombardment from Mount Sciberras above. The fort fell on 23 June; none of the knights survived, and only nine Maltese defenders escaped by swimming across the harbour. The Ottoman corsair-admiral Dragut was mortally wounded here by debris from a misfired cannon.
Did you know? Lower St Elmo stood in for the Turkish prison in the 1978 film Midnight Express.
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
mmmmngai@rogers.com · CC BY-SA 2.0 Lippe took as a model his own island fortress of Wilhelmstein in Lower Saxony. The plan is a square of roughly 150 metres with pentagonal bastions at the corners, four ravelins shielding the curtain walls, a hornwork and a deep dry moat, all wrapped in a star-shaped outer earthwork. The design was drawn by the French engineer Étienne and completed under Guillaume de Valleré. Layer after layer of walls closes in towards the centre, where a round, two-storey redoubt holds the heart of the fort: a decorated chapel on the ground floor, a cistern carved into the rock below, and the governor's house above, from which the commander could see the whole fortification spread around him.
Did you know? In 1808 a Spanish general who refused to accept the Convention of Sintra shelled the fort from afar, knocking only cornices and chimneys off the governor's house.
03 Bourtange
Kingdom of the Netherlands53.007° N 7.192° E
Image by frankvogelezang from Pixabay Bourtange was never taken by an attacking army. Its most famous test came in 1672, when the forces of Christoph Bernhard von Galen, the Prince-Bishop of Münster and an ally of Louis XIV, invaded the northern Netherlands; the fort, protected by the marsh as much as by its walls, held. In the late 1730s and early 1740s the defences were rebuilt and enlarged, with new ravelins and a glacis, reaching their greatest extent. The garrison left in 1851, the fortress was decommissioned, and much of the earthwork was levelled and sold off as the place became an ordinary farming village.
Did you know? In 1593 a Spanish force of about 3,000 men under Francisco Verdugo tried to take the new fort and withdrew in September without success.
04 Kastellet
Denmark · 2.4 km from Copenhagen55.692° N 12.594° E
CucombreLibre from New York, NY, USA · CC BY 2.0 Kastellet was part of Copenhagen's defence against the British in 1807 and fell to German troops without resistance on 9 April 1940. Two Dutch baroque gates survive from Rüse's original work: the ornate King's Gate facing the city and the plainer Norway Gate to the north. Inside stand long two-storey terraces of soldiers' barracks called the Rows, two great storehouses meant to feed a garrison of 1,800 for four years, the baroque Commander's House of 1725, a powder house, and the Citadel Church of 1703–1704, with a prison behind it; holes in the wall let prisoners follow the services.
Did you know? The King's Gate carries a bust of Frederik III, and its clock and two bells were brought from the old guard house at Kongens Nytorv in 1874.
05 Palmanova Fortress
Fortezza di Palmanova
Italy · 19.1 km from Udine45.905° N 13.310° E
Maddy16869 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The design gathered the best military thinking of its day. The veteran Venetian commander Giulio Savorgnan advised on the defences, Marcantonio Barbaro led the group of noblemen in charge of the project, and the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi is usually credited with the urban plan. Between the points of the star, bastions projected so that each could cover the next with crossfire, a moat ringed the whole, and entry was through three monumental gates, Porta Udine, Porta Cividale and Porta Aquileia. The first circuit, about seven kilometres around, took thirty years to build.
Did you know? In 1593 Venetian planners weighed eleven-sided and ten-sided designs before the Senate settled on nine sides, partly because every extra bastion added cost.
06 Almeida Fortress
Praça-forte de Almeida
Portugal · 36.5 km from Guarda40.726° N 6.906° W
Fernando Gabriel · CC BY-SA 3.0 The plan is an irregular star of six bastions separated by six curtain walls, each curtain screened by a detached ravelin, so that the outline has twelve points in all. 5 km, the walls are faced with dressed granite, and the dry ditch in front of them is around twelve metres deep. Two double gates lead in, each approached across a masonry bridge and running as a vaulted, bomb-proof tunnel through the rampart under the royal arms: the Portas de São Francisco and the Portas de Santo António.
Did you know? The Portuguese garrison during the 1810 siege was commanded by a British officer, Brigadier William Cox.
07 Naarden Fortress
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 21.6 km from Utrecht52.293° N 5.158° E
Helfmann · CC BY-SA 3.0 The ramparts that followed went through several generations. Early bastions in the Old Dutch manner were laid out after 1572, with Adriaen Anthonisz as the main designer. The French took the neglected fortress without a fight in 1672 and added ravelins and a palisaded outer line, but lost it the next year to William III of Orange, who then ordered a complete rebuilding. The design was drawn up by Adriaan Dortsman with the help of Nicolaas Witsen, and after years of sabotage by an Amsterdam city government that saw the new fortress as a threat rather than a shield, the work was completed by Willem Paen; by 1685 the present double belt of walls and water was finished.
Did you know? In 1813 to 1814 the French garrison held out under siege for months, refusing to believe Napoleon had fallen, and left only in May 1814.
08 Fortifications of Neuf-Brisach
Place forte de Neuf-Brisach
France · 32.5 km from Mulhouse48.017° N 7.527° E
Carsten Steger · CC BY-SA 4.0 The town exists because of a loss. Under the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 France had to give up Breisach, its fortress on the far bank of the Rhine, and Louis XIV ordered a new stronghold to fill the gap in the frontier between Strasbourg and Mulhouse. Vauban and Jacques Tarade drew the plans; the first stone was laid on 18 October 1698, and the fortifications were complete by about 1702. A canal was dug to carry the pink Vosges sandstone used in the walls. Vauban died in 1707 and the work was finished by Louis de Cormontaigne.
Did you know? Rubble from the demolished fortified town of Saint-Louis de Brisach was shipped by canal and reused to build Neuf-Brisach.
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 remarkable star forts in Europe?
- On our list, Fort Saint Elmo (Malta) ranks first, followed by Fort of Nossa Senhora da Graça, Elvas (Portugal) and Bourtange (Kingdom of the Netherlands).
- Which country has the most star forts in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from the Kingdom of the Netherlands (2), Portugal (2) and Denmark (1).
- Why are star forts shaped like stars?
- The angled bastions at each point leave no blind spots at the foot of the walls. Defenders on one bastion can fire along the face of the next, so attackers cannot shelter anywhere close to the fortifications.
- What is the trace italienne?
- It is the bastioned system of fortification developed in Italy in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in response to gunpowder artillery. Its low, thick walls with angular bastions became the standard across Europe for some three hundred years.
- Who designed Neuf-Brisach?
- Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, the military engineer of Louis XIV, designed it at the end of the seventeenth century as his last fortified town. It is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Fortifications of Vauban.
- How many star forts are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 8 star forts in 6 countries. The Kingdom of the Netherlands has the most, with 2.