Elmina Fort
Elmina

About Elmina (the mine)

Named for the huge gold mines nearby, this fort held gold and slaves until a European fleet arrived, crammed the people on board, and shipped them overseas.  Between the Dutch takeover in 1637 and the end of the slave trade, at least thirty thousand (30,000) people were sold overseas, departing Africa forever through Elmina's Door of No Return.

Ghana, Africa
Ghana
Artesanal Gold Mining
ArtesanalGoldMining
Door of No Return
Door of No Return
Oldest Image Elmina, 1502
Elmina
Founding
Founding
Gold and Ivory Sales 1690
Gold Buying & Selling, 1690

Exploring the Fort

Virtual Elmina (web version) enters the fort as it would be if you visited it today . Only walls remain because the British gutted the interior when they took over in 1872,. Virtual Elmina is also available as a download for Mac and for Windows under Creative Commons License   Copyright.

The tour begins on the ground floor and ends with the male and female dungeons and the Door of No Return. Press the space bar once to pause the tour and look around (360 degrees). To resume the tour just press the space bar again.

The second part shows you where the slave merchants, soldiers, and Dutch West India Company representatives lived. In some places in the fort, we have been able to find historical objects or images that would have been in the fort. Choose 1729 for an Augmented Virtual Reality tour to see how some of the rooms looked in the past. Some of the objects are modelled on the exhibit West Africa: Word-Symbol-Song.

UCI Virtual Environments Team

Magda El Zarki

Engineer

Director, Institute for Virtual Environments and Computer Games

Patricia Seed

Web Guru

Author, Historian, Cartographer, and occasionally Graphic Artist

Alex Longazo

Lead Programmer

UCI and USC graduate and current Professional Software Designer.

Jessica Kernan

Design Consultant

Professional Game Designer for Independent and Triple A Companies.