Castillo San Felipe del Morro — fort
Joshua Wood · CC BY-SA 3.0

Castillo San Felipe del Morro

  • 2 min read
  • 18.471° N 66.124° W

Interesting facts

  • In March 1915 a gunner at El Morro fired on the German freighter Odenwald as it left without clearance, often called the first American shots of World War I.
  • Beside the US and Puerto Rican flags, the fort flies the Cross of Burgundy, the red saltire carried by Spanish armies from 1506 to 1785.
  • Steven Spielberg used El Morro in Amistad as a stand-in for a slave-trading fort in Sierra Leone.
  • The 1587 plan that shaped El Morro also covered nine other ports, among them Havana, Cartagena, Portobelo, Panama City and St Augustine.
  • Its walls are a sandwich: dressed limestone and sandstone blocks on both faces with rubble packed in between.
  • The first defences on the headland were modest: a tower with four gun openings and a three-gun battery at the water's edge.
  • By 1555 the fort had eight bronze cannon, mounted chiefly against French privateers.
  • In the early 20th century the US Army covered the esplanade in front of the fort with baseball diamonds, officers' quarters and even a golf course.
  • The top of the old lighthouse was shot away during the American bombardment of 1898; the rebuilt light stands about 55 metres above the sea.
  • A colony of about 200 cats lives in and around the fort, thought to descend from animals brought in to control rats.

Why it is worth it

Castillo San Felipe del Morro rises in six levels from the Atlantic at the northwestern tip of the islet of Old San Juan, a mass of sandstone walls, ramps, gun batteries and sentry boxes climbing some 43 metres from the surf to the headland. For three and a half centuries it guarded the narrow entrance to San Juan Bay, the harbour of a city Spain regarded as a key to its Caribbean empire.

Work began in 1539 on the orders of Charles V, with a small tower and a water battery placed on the rocky promontory, the morro that gives the fort its name. The design still seen today was drawn in 1587 by Field Marshal Juan de Tejeda and the Italian military engineer Bautista Antonelli, as part of a plan to fortify Spain's key ports from Havana to Cartagena. From 1589 masons, stonecutters and enslaved labourers built a hornwork across the headland: two half-bastions, Tejeda on the ocean side and Austria on the harbour side, joined by a curtain wall behind a moat and drawbridge. After the British captured Havana in 1762, Alejandro O'Reilly and the engineer Tomás O'Daly were sent to make San Juan a first-rank stronghold. The walls were thickened to between about 5.5 and 12 metres, cisterns holding some 820,000 litres of rainwater were dug beneath the main plaza, and the Santa Bárbara battery was armed with 37 guns. The fort reached its present form in 1787.

El Morro's record under fire is long. In 1595 its gunners helped turn back Sir Francis Drake's fleet; in 1598 the Earl of Cumberland took it by attacking from the land side, the only time it fell, though dysentery drove his troops away within months. In 1625 a Dutch force sacked the city while the fort held out, and in 1797 a British invasion under Ralph Abercromby was repelled. Its last battle came in 1898, when the US Navy bombarded San Juan during the Spanish–American War. Under American rule it became part of an army post; a lighthouse was rebuilt on top in 1906–08, and a concrete fire-control station was added in the Second World War. The army left in 1961, the National Park Service took over, and in 1983 El Morro was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List with the walls of Old San Juan. In 1992 the broad lawn in front was cleared to restore the open field of fire of Spanish times.

Getting there

El Morro stands in Old San Juan, the historic quarter of San Juan. The nearest airport is Fernando Luis Ribas Dominicci Airport (SIG) at Isla Grande, about 3 km away; Puerto Rico's main international airport, Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport (SJU) in Carolina, is about 13 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Beautiful Castles, Palaces and Fortresses in the United States 6The Most Impressive Forts 33The Most Beautiful Castles, Palaces and Fortresses 302

From the encyclopaedia

Castillo San Felipe del Morro, most commonly known as El Morro, is a large fortress and citadel in the Old San Juan historic quarter of San Juan, the capital city and municipality of Puerto Rico. Commissioned by King Charles I of Spain in 1539, it was first built as a fortified tower in honor of King Philip II, who oversaw its expansion into a hornwork bastion fort by 1595. Over the next 200 years, especially in the reign of King Charles III, El Morro continued to be developed to reach its current form in 1787. Rising 43 metres (140 ft) from the Atlantic shoreline with 5.5 to 7.6 metres thick walls, the six-leveled edifice stands on a steep, rocky headland promontory on San Juan Islet guarding the entry to San Juan Bay, the harbor of Old San Juan. El Morro, alongside La Fortaleza, San Cristóbal, El Cañuelo, and other forts part of the Walls of Old San Juan, protected strategically and militarily important Puerto Rico, or La Llave de las Indias, from invasion by competing world powers during the Age of Discovery and Sail. It was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1983.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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