Fort Of San Carlos Of The Cabin
Colossal eighteenth-century bastion fortress whose nightly cannon shot once set an entire city's clocks.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Fort of San Carlos of the Cabin in Havana opens with a puzzle: how a colonial city with no reliable watches agreed, every night, on the exact moment nine o'clock arrived. It follows the fortress's origin in Spanish embarrassment after the 1762 British capture of Havana, engineer Silvestre Abarca's use of the newest Vauban military science, and the eleven years it took to raise nearly seven hundred meters of wall along this ridge. Along the way it takes in the battalions once housed in its casemates and the ditches and killing grounds Abarca mapped out before a single stone was cut.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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