Tourism of the slave castles is becoming increasingly popular along the West African coast. The most popular tourist attractions are the slave castles in Ghana were the largest castles are located like Elmina Castle, Cape Coast Castle, Fort Coromantine, and Fort Metal Cross at Dixcove and also the castle on Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. African Americans, spurred initially in the 1970s by Alex Haley's popular novel and later TV miniseries Roots, have come to the slave castles in increasing numbers, in search of their roots. These tours, commonly called roots tours or cultural heritage tours have become like pilgramages for African Americans because they symbolize the passage of their ancestors. At these slave castles African American visitors stand where their ancestors once stood, feel the darkness and dampness of the dungeons their ancestors once forcibly inhabited, they walk through the courtyards where their ancestors wer once herded and priced like animals. Some say through the silence you can sometimes hear the wailing of dead slaves. The emotional and pyschological effects on the visitors are intense. African Americans are not the only ones who visit these slave castles. White and black Africans and Europeans alike visit these castles , turning the visitor population into an interesting mix of slave trader and slave descendents who although have different opinions about the significance and meaning of the castles all come together to acknowlege the past.

Organizations such as the Save Elmina Association offer support to help with the maintenance of the slave castles and these organizations have not only succeeded in keeping up the castles they have stopped defamation and desecration of the grounds by tourist authorities. At one time tourist authorities set up cafes and bars inside some of the castles and started to clean and whitewas the dungeons of the castles. But protestors staged a sit in to protest the desecration of what they believe to be shrines to the crime of slavery and won.