Fort Salta

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Fort Salta
Name	Fort Salta スラトア要塞 Suratoa-yōsai
Information
Territory	Marley
Status	Active
Debut
Manga	The Wings of Freedom

	If he knows about the existence of a weapon that has a chance, however small, of successfully attacking the Founding Titan... ...that'll be his next stop after Karifa. He'll destroy the airships.
— Pieck Finger and Yelena deduce Fort Salta as Eren Yeager's target

Fort Salta (スラトア要塞 Suratoa-yōsai^?) is a Marleyan fortification and airship research base in the southern mountainous region of the continental mainland. It served as a rallying point for the surviving remnants of the Marleyan military in the final hours of the Rumbling during the Battle of Heaven and Earth.

Structure

Fort Salta was constructed into a mesa which towers over a wide, arid landscape of scattered buttes and rock formations. It is connected via a railway, which weaves between the surrounding buttes before spiraling up the face of the mesa to the top of the hill.

The summit of the mesa possesses extensive facilities, including facilities to maintain a sizeable fleet of military airships and to develop and test new airship models. Some of the smaller hills surrounding Fort Salta also contain structures at their summit.

Story

War for Paradis arc

Upon arriving in Odiha, Yelena confesses to Armin Arlert and Levi Ackerman about a strategic meeting she held with Eren Yeager. She details a plan to cripple Marley's military forces with a partial Rumbling in order to secure Paradis Island's safety for several decades to come. When Eren expresses his uncertainty of her plan to attack the port city of Karifa to crush the Global Allied Fleet before it is ready, Yelena voices her concern about Fort Salta's airship base being a potential threat. She deduces that, with Eren unleashing the full force of the Rumbling to raze the world, he would next target Fort Salta to prevent any resistance against the Founding Titan and its Wall Titans.

Not long afterwards, a train carrying survivors from Liberio approaches Fort Salta, where Annie Leonhart's father hopes to find an airship that the refugees can use to evade the Rumbling. Shortly after, they spot the fleet of airships taking off, followed by the arrival of the Founder's Rumbling. Initially despairing that they have been left to die, the Marleyan conductor then realizes the airships took off in response to the Titans' arrival, and are in fact a military squadron about to bomb the incoming Titans from an unreachable height.

However, the airship squadron is swiftly annihilated when an apparition of the Beast Titan scatters projectiles towards the fleet. Afterwards, a flying boat approaches the Founding Titan and Eren is soon confronted by his former comrades alongside Warrior unit. Noticing a Titan flying overhead, the soldiers spot a group of people hanging on and they are given hope to continue firing the fort's cannons, despite them being largely ineffective against the approaching Titans. However, the soldiers notice a group of Eldian refugees arrive and immediately draw their guns on the citizens.

Trivia

• Unlike the majority of Marleyan location names which are based in Latin or Italian nomenclature, "Salta" simply appears to be "Atlas" spelled backwards. This is also applicable to the original katakana in which the characters for Atlas (アトラス Atorasu^?) are reversed. This may refer to its location being, when vertically mirrored, analogous to the Atlas Mountains of northern Algeria.
  • Coincidentally, the name "Salta" still fits with the Latin and Italian nomenclature of Marleyan location names, as "salta" means "skip" in Italian, derived from the Latin "saltus".