Kangra fort stands on a spur between two rivers and is one of the oldest forts in India. The Katoch rajas who held it claim one of the longest ruling lineages anywhere.
The temple of Brajeshwari Devi, in the old town of Kangra, was fabulously wealthy and was plundered repeatedly: by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1009, by Firoz Shah Tughlaq, and by others.
Akbar could not take the fort and took the temple's treasure instead. Jahangir took the fort in 1620 after a fourteen-month siege, the first Mughal to hold it.
The Gurkhas besieged it from 1807 and never took it. Ranjit Singh Ji's army raised the siege in 1809, Sansar Chand ceded the fort to him, and the Sikh state held it until 1846.
It was largely destroyed by the Kangra earthquake of 4 April 1905, which killed around twenty thousand people across the valley and is one of the deadliest earthquakes in Indian history. The fort has been a ruin since.
A fortress that a thousand years of armies could not take was taken down in about a minute by a fault under it.
It is entered up a rising ramp through a series of gates, each turning back on the last, so an attacking party is under fire from above for the whole approach. That is why it needed a siege and not an assault, and the ramp and the gates are still the way in.
The treasure was the point of taking it. What accumulated in the temple over centuries was carried off in stages by one army after another, and the reason anybody thought a fourteen month siege was worth sitting through is that everybody knew what was inside.
The earthquake of 1905 destroyed much of it and it has been a ruin since. The temples inside it are still visited.