Sept. 22 – Ghana – Castles and Dungeons

We arrived in Ghana this morning at the port in Takaradi.  As soon as the ship cleared customs, we boarded our tour bus to start the Castles and Dungeons tour.  This tour starts with about an hour drive from the port and visits a two of the castles that were built in the late 1400s by the Portuguese who lost them to the Dutch in the 1600s and then were taken over by the British in the late 1800s.  The castles were built as a trade centers for gold, ivory and slaves.  The tour through the castle followed the footsteps of the slaves tht were held in the dungeons and then walking down the tunnel where the slaves walked to the waiting ship to be taken to North and South America.  We drove back towards our ship and stopped at a second castle in Elmenia.  The cost of Ghana is dotted with 16 of these castles all used as trade centers for over 300 years.   Over the years, it is estimated that more than 30 million people were captured and sent into slavery from these centers.



Castle (Trade Center) in Elmenia



Castle in Elmenia - Door to left is a place where guards watched the slaves move to the waiting ships

Entrence to the Female Slave dungeons

The trip from the ship traveled through Elmenia and beyond to the castles and passed through several smaller villages.  Most of the housing in these villages were dilapidated shacks with people selling and trading goods along the roadways.  Men worked on cars and other machinery and women and children carried bags of everything on their heads.  Garbage, goats and chickens were also plentiful additions in the villages.



Coconut Grove Resort



Between castle visit, we stopped for lunch and got a bit of a surprise.  We had been traveling through these villages made up of shacks and small business on the side of the street.  We were taken to lunch at the Coconut Grove Resort - a “country club” with golf course, palm trees, swimming pool and small lodges all on the ocean beach.  It was beautiful and a stark contrast to the locations and conditions in the villages we had just driven by.  This contrast is consistis every where we went in Ghana.