Skeletal women with wind-whipped hair, half-seen atop the ramparts in the wee hours. Children, giggling demonically as they flit down passageways. The Fortaleza del Real Felipe, in Lima’s seedy port district of El Callao, has never lacked for resident haunts. The colonial garrison has certainly had time to accumulate them. Commissioned in 1747 by Viceroy José Antonio Manso de Velasco, the fort was the Spanish crown’s response to one of the chief irritants to its overseas empire: pirates. Starting in the 1500s, El Callao, on the Pacific coast of Peru,…
