Španjola: The Fort Named After Its Losers

Španjola is the largest fortification above Herceg Novi, it took nine years to build, and it is named after people who were there for one of them.

In 1538 the Holy League fleet under Andrea Doria took Castelnuovo and left a Spanish garrison in it. Those men understood immediately what the Ottomans had understood before them: the town is not defensible from the waterline alone. Whoever holds the hill behind it holds the town. They began fortifying Bajer at once.

They had twelve months. In July 1539 Hayreddin Barbarossa arrived with an army that ended the Spanish presence in the Bay of Kotor permanently, and the garrison of Castelnuovo died more or less to a man. What they left on the hill was an unfinished circuit — and, because the local population went on calling it after them, a name.

The Ottomans did not start again somewhere else. They built on the line the Spanish had traced, and kept building for nine years — from 1539 to 1548 — which is a very long time to spend on one fortress and tells you how much the hill mattered.

What they produced is a square circuit of massive walls with a circular bastion at each of the four corners. That geometry is not decorative. A round tower deflects shot that a square corner catches, and a bastion at each corner means every stretch of wall can be covered by fire from the towers on either side of it. Nothing can approach the wall without being shot at from two directions.

It has been described as the best-preserved Ottoman fortification on the Adriatic — a claim worth attributing rather than asserting, but not an unreasonable one when you are standing in front of it.

What came after

Venice took the town in 1687 and the hill with it. The Austro-Hungarians filled the courtyard with barrack blocks and used the shell as accommodation. Then the empires ran out, and so did the reasons to keep a fort on Bajer.

Nobody has garrisoned Španjola in a hundred years. The curtain is breached in places, the courtyard is overgrown, the interior is roofless and the walls carry a good deal of spray paint. There is no ticket office and no opening time.

That is worth stating plainly rather than apologetically. Forte Mare is restored, ticketed and programmed; Kanli Kula seats a thousand people. Španjola is the one that was left alone, and it is the only place in Herceg Novi where you can put your hand on sixteenth-century military engineering that nobody has tidied.

The walk up is steep — the fortress sits at about 170 metres, above the Savina district — and the reward at the top is the entire entrance to the Bay of Kotor in a single view: Forte Mare below, the strait, Luštica opposite, and Mamula out at the mouth. Every fortification in this article can be seen from the roof of this one, which is the clearest possible statement of what the system was for.