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I've made this concept of a grand port city, possibly belonging to Tharwain. On the drawing you can see the seaside entrance to the port, and a small map on which you can see that a river flows trough the city ending in the port. The other drawing is a detail of the gate protecting the port entrance.

From a practical standpoint, sea gates are not effective.  They're expensive to build and maintain, and they don't offer much extra protection over a couple well manned towers.  One of the biggest issues with sea gates is that a small harbour isn't worth investing in protecting like this, but a large one has so much traffic that the bottleneck is unworkable.  In this specific case, a river also causes a logistical nightmare because it deposits silt which must be dredged regularly.

Now, if I could stop ranting about the impracticable nature of sea gates, I could add that it's a great looking port.  We do need to decide on Tharwain architectural style (I'm thinking medieval European).

From a practical standpoint, sea gates are not effective.  They're expensive to build and maintain, and they don't offer much extra protection over a couple well manned towers.  One of the biggest issues with sea gates is that a small harbour isn't worth investing in protecting like this, but a large one has so much traffic that the bottleneck is unworkable.  In this specific case, a river also causes a logistical nightmare because it deposits silt which must be dredged regularly.

the drawing is just to bring over the idea, not neccesarily to scale or very specific. i imagine this as a large harbour (the harbour), so it's worth the investment. the bottleneck problem is not really much of a problem, make the entrance wider or make 2 (1 in, 1 out). also, the gates would be open all day, only closed in times of an attack or a very rough sea.
the river problem i don't have a solution for, but it's a story after all so if it's cool enough we can just act as if there is no problem

If you want to make it more complicated, you could have two entrances. One shallow and one deep. The shallow one could be open at all times, while the deep entrance could have a gate that could be closed under an attack.

Solinx

But then enemies and wild sea would still get in, only the enemies' battleships would be unable to enter.