The Citadelle Laferrière is the largest fortress in the Americas, raised on a mountain peak of 900 metres above the town of Milot in northern Haiti between 1805 and 1820 by people newly freed from slavery, to hold off a French return that never came, and it is reached by a steep cobbled track on foot or horseback through coffee plots and cloud forest. Henri Christophe, a general of the revolution that had defeated Napoleon's army and made Haiti the first free Black republic in 1804, built it with twenty thousand workers as the last redoubt of the new state, with room for five thousand soldiers and a year's supplies, and crowned himself king in 1811; the walls are up to forty metres high and four thick, and the prow of the fortress is a wedge like the bow of a stone ship, built so that cannonballs would glance off rather than punch through, its walls sloping back from an acute angle, and the curved outer walls are pierced with brick-lined gun ports angled to give the cannon a clean line over the approach. Inside, a long vaulted armoury still holds rows of iron cannon on their carriages, many captured from the French and British and bearing their royal crests, flanked by pyramids of cannonballs stacked as they were left.
The stacked galleries climb to the rooftop terrace, the highest point, where on a clear morning the plain of Cap-Haïtien spreads out toward the line of the Atlantic, and the cloud that wraps the summit most afternoons lifts most reliably from February to April. Christophe never fought the battle he built for: a stroke in 1820 left him half-paralysed, his soldiers turned against him, and he shot himself, with a silver bullet by legend, and was buried in the fortress in a bed of lime. Below the peak lie the ruins of his palace of Sans-Souci, a Versailles of the tropics wrecked by the earthquake of 1842, and the two are a UNESCO site together. The Citadelle is a fortress built by the freed, and it was never needed.