Cape Three Points

Cape Three Points is Ghana's southernmost projection into the Atlantic, a small rocky peninsula between Axim and Princes Town. Forested shore, surf and open sea meet where the coastline turns, while the cape stands out as a landfall. Nearby Ahanta people lived along a coast with sheltered bays, fishing grounds and routes inland through the Ankobra and Tano valleys.

Portuguese traders built a lodge near Axim in 1503, but local attacks forced them to abandon it. In 1515 they raised Fort Santo António on a nearby rocky promontory, one of the earliest European forts on the Gold Coast. Gold from Adanse and Denkyira was exchanged there; after the Dutch captured Elmina, Axim held out for several years. By the 1720s Dutch control had replaced Portuguese authority.

A third trading power followed. Brandenburg Africa Company built Fort Gross Friedrichsburg at Princes Town in 1683–1684 as a rival headquarters. Ahanta broker John Conny directed ships and commerce there, making the fort a center of gold and slave trading until the Dutch took it in 1724. Cape Three Points thus marked a contested coast where local chiefs, African merchants and European companies competed for inland wealth.