Fortress facts for kids
A fortress is a building designed to be defended, which means it was very hard for enemies to get inside. Fortification kept the people inside safe. There is little difference between a fortress and a castle. Fortresses normally have thick stone walls, thicker but less tall than in castles so artillery cannot break them. There were very small windows, without glass, so that soldiers inside could fire out through them. As time passed, the weapons they used changed, from bow and arrow, crossbow, gun or cannon. Soldiers outside had great difficulty firing into such small windows. The people defending the fortress were also able to drop things like rocks and boiling oil on the heads of those below. Successful attacks were usually sieges.
Fortresses were not designed for comfort. They were dark and often damp. The Tower of London is an example of a fortress.
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Images for kids
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Castillo San Felipe de Barajas, Colombia. Cartagena's colonial walled city and fortress were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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Maiden Castle in 1935. The Iron Age hillfort was first built in 600 BC.
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Early 20th century aerial photograph of the fortifications of Valletta, Malta which were built in the 16th and 17th centuries
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Aerial photograph of Fort Vossegat, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
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Large Chinese fort
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Han dynasty tomb brick showing gate towers
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Han dynasty tomb brick showing watchtowers
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Remains of a fortified village, Borġ in-Nadur, Malta. Borġ in-Nadur is a notable example of Bronze Age-fortifications.
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Defensive wall of the ancient city of Dholavira, Gujarat 2600 BCE
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The Great Wall of China near Jinshanling. The Great Wall was a series of fortifications built across the historical northern borders of China.
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An American flag raised at the Fort Santiago, 1898. Fort Santiago was a citadel that was a part of the Intramuros, a walled city within Manilla.
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Map of the defences available during the Battle of the Trench, 627. Muslim defenders repelled the Confederates using Medina's natural fortifications and makeshift trenches.
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Medieval defensive walls and towers in Szprotawa, Poland, made of field stone and bog iron.
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John Smith's 1624 map of the fortifications of the Castle Harbour Islands and St. George's Harbour in Bermuda. Construction beginning in 1612, these were the first stone fortifications, with the first coastal artillery batteries, built by England in the New World.
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Table of a typical bastion fort, 1728. The development of bastion forts resulted from the increased use of cannons and firearms in the 14th century.
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Suomenlinna, a sea fortress from 18th century in Helsinki, Finland
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The ditch and counter scarp of Fort Delimara. Built in 1878, Delimara was built as a typical polygonal fort ditches and counter scarps made to be very deep, vertically sided, and cut directly into the rocks.
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The tunnels of Fort de Mutzig, German fortifications built in 1893. By the 19th century, tunnels were used to connect blockhouses and firing points in the ditch to the fort.
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Gun emplacement in Fort Campbell, built in the 1930s. Due to the threat of aerial warfare, the buildings were placed at a distance from each other, making it difficult to find from the air.
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A GBU-24 2,000lb bomb hits the ground. The development of bunker busters, bombs designed to penetrate hardened targets buried underground, led to a decline in the use of fortifications.
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Cheyenne Mountain Complex is an underground bunker used by North American Aerospace Defense Command. Cheyenne Mountain is an example of a mid-20th century fortification built deep in a mountain.
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The Ozama Fortress in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic is recognized by UNESCO for being the oldest military construction of European origin in the Americas.
See also
In Spanish: Fortificación para niños
