Chavonnes Battery Museum

Under the Clock Tower Precinct at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town lie the remains of an eighteenth-century fortress. The Chavonnes Battery Museum now occupies ground the Dutch East India Company fortified between 1714 and 1725. The battery formed part of the coastal defences linked to the Castle of Good Hope, shielding bay and town from European powers.

The fortress took a U shape, a stone wall raised on a rocky outcrop. Sixteen mounted guns swept an arc of fire of nearly 180 degrees. Later the same walls held a prison and the quarantine and convalescent wing of the old Somerset Hospital. In 1861 the Alfred Basin's construction claimed some of its stone and rubble for a breakwater. Coal bunkers and a fish factory then rose over what remained. When work on the precinct began in the 1990s, archaeologists from the University of Cape Town excavated much of the battery.

The museum today holds the excavated walls, a well and other components of the old fortification. Displays set out cannons alongside the equipment needed to maintain and fire them. Contemporary art exhibitions share the space with guided tours and with information boards that trace the history of Cape Town. The well among the walls has outlasted the guns, the prison and everything the harbour stacked above it.