Fuerte de San Diego (Museo Histórico de Acapulco)

The Fuerte de San Diego is a star-shaped stone fort on a low hill just east of Acapulco's Zócalo, looking down on the port and the bay. Acapulco was the American end of the Manila galleon route, and the silks, porcelain and spices that arrived from Asia drew English and Dutch pirates; after a Dutch fleet attacked the town in 1615, the viceroy Diego Fernández de Córdoba, Marquis of Guadalcázar, ordered a fort built. It was designed by the Dutch-born military engineer Adrián Boot, who had worked on San Juan de Ulúa in Veracruz, and finished in 1617 as an irregular pentagon with five bastions named for the King, the Prince, the Duke, the Marquis and Guadalcázar.

An earthquake in 1776 badly damaged it, and engineer Ramón Panón replaced it with the regular pentagon seen today, built between 1778 and 1783 and able to hold 2,000 people with food and water for a year. It was renamed San Carlos after King Carlos III, but locals kept calling it San Diego. During the War of Independence the Spanish garrison held out inside for months until it surrendered to José María Morelos in August 1813, and the fort stayed in military use through the French intervention and the Revolution. It was later used by different federal agencies, returned to INAH in 1980, and opened as the Museo Histórico de Acapulco on 24 April 1986.

The museum's 14 rooms tell the port's story from its pre-Hispanic peoples, through the galleon trade and the pirates it attracted, to independence. Highlights include a cross-section of a galleon, Chinese porcelain and Asian silks, ivory, old maps and weapons, an 18th-century model of a Spanish ship, a Japanese katana in a carved ivory sheath and a royal carriage. Walk the moat, bastions and ramparts for one of the best views over Acapulco Bay. The fort also hosts the yearly Festival Internacional de la Nao, which celebrates the port's old ties with Asia.