Elmina

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Elmina fishing fleet
Elmina fishing fleet

Elmina is a town situated on a south-facing bay on the Atlantic Ocean coast of Ghana, lying west of Cape Coast. The first European settlement in West Africa, it now has a population of around 20,000 people.

The town grew around São Jorge da Mina Castle, built by the Portuguese Diogo de Azambuja in 1482, and was Portugal's West African headquarters for trade and exploitation of African wealth. The original Portuguese interest was gold but this later expanded to include ten of thousands of slaves channeled through the trading post of El Mina. The location of Elmina made it a significant site for reprovisioning ships headed south towards the Cape of Good Hope on their way to India. The Dutch West India Company captured it in 1637; in subsequent centuries it was mostly used for the slave trade. The city remained in Dutch hands until 1872, when it was sold to the English.

Elmina is also home to Fort St Jago, built by the Dutch in 1666, several Asafo shrines and a lagoon. Today, Elmina's main industry is fishing.


Coordinates: 5°05′N 1°21′W

Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.