Fort Point, San Francisco

Fort Point, known historically as the Castillo de San Joaquín (Spanish for "Saint Joachim's Castle") is a masonry seacoast fortification located on the southern side of the Golden Gate at the entrance to San Francisco Bay. It is also the geographic name of the promontory upon which the fort and the southern approach of the Golden Gate Bridge were constructed.

The site was originally fortified by the Spanish in 1794 as a complementary defense outpost to the Presidio of San Francisco. The current structure was completed by the United States Army after the U.S. conquest of California and just before the American Civil War, to defend San Francisco Bay against hostile warships. The fort is now protected as Fort Point National Historic Site, a United States National Historic Site administered by the National Park Service as a unit of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It is now popular as a tourist viewing point of the Golden Gate Bridge directly on top of it.

Text adapted from “Fort Point National Historic Site” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Fort Point, San Francisco ranks #1,759 of 3,691 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #42 of the 48 mapped in United States. Founded 1848, it is older than 9% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 221 atlas entries founded in the 19th century. See how United States compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia ↗