The Spanish Fort (16th Century) in the Kasbah of Bejaia (Algeria)

In the Kasbah of Bejaia, the most imposing building is a fort built under the Spanish occupation at the beginning of the sixteenth century. This bastioned structure consists of mighty perimeter walls (from 12 to 20 meters high on the outside) which contain an embankment surmounted by a terrace.The lower part of the Kasbah dates back to different eras, whereas the upper part was built by the Spaniards and date back to the sixteenth century. The form of the Kasbah is a rectangle which one side is adjacent to the city. It is flanked by strongholds and bastions and by three very high and very massive towers, with murder holes. The fort contains five interesting internal rooms, hidden inside the embankment and organized on three levels: two rectangular vaulted rooms, two overlapping circular rooms surmounted by a domes and a narrow rectangle covered by a barrel vault.This paper reports the preliminary results of an in-depth interdisciplinary and multiscale study that was carried out on the fort to identify any weaknesses and vulnerabilities to external actions and natural hazards, including seismic loads.