The Baluarte de Santiago is the sole remaining section of the fortified wall that once enclosed the colonial city of Veracruz. Built in 1635, it was one of nine bastions that formed the city's defences against the pirate attacks that plagued the Gulf port throughout the 17th century. The wall itself was demolished in the 19th century as the city expanded, but this single thick-walled bastion survived.
Inside there is a small but genuinely interesting museum displaying pre-Hispanic gold jewelry recovered from the harbor — objects that were lost when ships sank or were thrown overboard during pirate attacks, and later dredged from the seafloor. The collection is modest but the pieces are striking, and the scale of what passed through this port — both in goods and in human lives — is brought into focus by standing in the bastion and imagining the wall that once extended from it in both directions.