Mahim Fort

This guide to Mahim Fort in Mumbai opens in 1661, when the island of Bombay, fort included, was handed to England as part of a royal marriage settlement between Portugal's Princess Catherine of Braganza and King Charles II. It traces the walls back to the Gujarati wars of 1534 and the British reinforcements added under Sir Thomas Grantham in 1684. You'll hear how those defenses were tested when an old rival returned decades later. Stand at the basalt battlements, now pressed between slums and the tide, and imagine the hundred soldiers and thirty cannon they once held.