Towers, Keeps and Strongholds: Nine Fortified Building Traditions from Sardinia to Bhutan

The nuraghe is a tower-fortress of large stones built on Sardinia during the Nuragic Age, roughly 1900 to 730 BC. More than 7,000 survive, and archaeologists believe the original total exceeded 10,000, which is why it stands first as the oldest fortified tradition on the path.

An Iron Age Scottish drystone tower with a hollow double wall holding mural cells and a spiral stair between inner and outer skins. The Broch of Mousa in Shetland still stands thirteen meters tall, and about 571 candidate sites are recorded, mostly in the north.

Kuelap, the best known Chachapoya monument, is a fortress ringed by exterior stone walls up to sixty feet high and holding more than four hundred interior buildings. The tradition favoured circular stone constructions and hillside platforms, and it continued past the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.

Defensive dwellings of Svaneti in Georgia, mostly built between the ninth and twelfth centuries. About three thousand five hundred still stand, three to five stories high with tapering walls and machicolated parapets, and a ground-level machub where people and animals shared the house.

The Ingush of the North Caucasus built three types: residential ghala of ten to twelve meters, semi-combat towers of twelve to sixteen, and combat towers called vhov rising twenty to thirty meters. Their height-to-base ratio is on the order of ten to one, the page notes.

The word comes from the Arabic qasaba, fortress, and names a citadel or fortified quarter, most commonly in North Africa. Spanish has the equivalent alcazaba, and in Algeria the term can also stretch to a whole medina quarter, so here the fortress is the heart of a city.

Five kingdoms, Bijapur, Golkonda, Ahmadnagar, Bidar and Berar, ruled the Deccan from the late fifteenth century and left forts at Bidar and Golkonda. The Gol Gumbaz dome, about forty four meters across, is described as the second largest built anywhere before the modern age.

The dzong is a fortress-monastery that has served religious, administrative and defensive roles since the seventeenth century. Bhutanese buildings use wooden frames and rammed earth, and are built without drawn plans and without nails or iron bars.

Yemen is known above all for its tower houses, which separate functions vertically: storage on the ground floor, living rooms in the middle and a large reception room called the mafraj at the top. Built of rammed earth, mudbrick or stone, the style has remained largely unchanged for centuries.