India · 17th century
Fort Vijf Sinnen ranks #8,168 of 9,040 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #217 of the 223 mapped in India. Founded c. 1690, it is older than 22% of the atlas's dated landmarks, one of 710 atlas entries founded in the 17th century. See how India compares in the castle statistics.
Fort Vijf Sinnen (also Vyf Sinnen, Dutch for "the five senses") was a fortification made by the Dutch East India Company in Nagapattinam, then part of Dutch Coromandel (1610-1798), now Tamil Nadu. The fortification, also described as a castle, was built to protect the interests of the trading company, which shifted the capital of the Coromandel operation from Pulicat to Nagapattinam in 1690, three years after work began on the fort.
The heavily armed fort in the end proved useless in the 1781 Siege of Negapatam, in which the British took the fort. In the Treaty of Paris of 1784 which ended the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of which this siege was part, Nagapattinam was not restored to Dutch rule, but remained British. The headquarters of the colony shifted back to Pulicat.
Text adapted from “Fort Vijf Sinnen” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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