Poland · 19th century
Świnoujście Fortress ranks #6,169 of 9,040 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #235 of the 397 mapped in Poland. Founded c. 1850, it is older than 7% of the atlas's dated landmarks, one of 705 atlas entries founded in the 19th century. Its Wikipedia articles were opened 1,324 times in the last 60 days, more than 58% of the atlas. 3 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. See how Poland compares in the castle statistics.
Świnoujście Fortress is an originally Prussian fortification at the mouth of the Świna into the Baltic Sea, intended to protect the sea route from the Oder and the Świna into the Baltic. Because of the strategic importance of the Świna estuary, the Swine sconce was laid out during the Thirty Years' War and was repeatedly the object of military conflicts in the following centuries. In the second half of the 19th century the Prussian army developed the installations into a fortress. After the fortress had survived the Second World War without major damage, the decay of the buildings, now partly used by the Soviet army, set in during the post-war period.
With the withdrawal of the Soviet army the military use of the fortress works ended at the beginning of the 1990s. The surviving fortifications are located north-east of the town of Świnoujście, in present-day Poland, on the islands of Usedom and Wolin and serve as tourist attractions.
Machine-translated from “Festung Swinemünde” on the German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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