Zanzibar City is the capital of the Zanzibar archipelago, spread along the west coast of Unguja island where the Indian Ocean monsoon once carried dhows from Arabia, Persia and India. Its heart is Stone Town, the former seat of the Zanzibar Sultanate and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000 — a knot of coral-stone houses, carved teak doors, stone baraza benches and shaded lanes barely wide enough for a handcart. Across the old creek lies Ng'ambo, "the other side", where the modern city hums.
This is a place whose stories outnumber its signposts. A self-guided audio tour lets you wander at the pace the alleys demand: pause under a balcony, press play, and hear how a single building turned from Omani palace to spice warehouse to museum. Every landmark below carries its own narrated chapter, so the town's layered history — Portuguese, Omani, Indian, British, Swahili — unfolds as you walk.
Seafront palaces of the sultans
Start on the waterfront, where the sultans put on their show. The House of Wonders, finished in 1883 for Sultan Barghash, was the first building in Zanzibar wired for electricity and the first in East Africa with an elevator; its 2020 collapse and slow rebuilding is a chapter of its own. Next door, the Sultan's Palace Museum keeps the royal furniture and the memory of Princess Salme, who eloped with a German merchant. Behind them, Ngome Kongwe — the Old Fort — is the town's oldest structure, raised by the Omanis around 1699 on a Portuguese chapel site; today it stages music and craft stalls. At dusk the whole town drifts to The Forodhani of Zanzibar, where seafood grills and sugar-cane presses light up the gardens.
The slave-trade story
Zanzibar was the last great slave market of the Indian Ocean, and the town does not hide it. The Christ Church Cathedral was deliberately built over the market site in the 1870s, its altar standing where the whipping post stood; the East Africa Slave Trade Exhibition beside it opens the cramped holding chambers and tells the story with rare candour. A short walk away, Tippu Tip's House belonged to the century's most powerful slave and ivory trader, its carved door still in place. Out along the north-west coast, the Mangapwani Slave Chamber shows where traders hid captives after the 1873 ban.
Lanes, doors and markets
Stone Town is best learned by getting lost in it. The Darajani Bazaar is the town's belly — cloves and cardamom on one side, fish auctions and butchers on the other. At Jaws Corner men argue over coffee beneath a wall of political posters, the town's unofficial parliament. On the harbour the Old Dispensary, built by an Ismaili merchant between 1887 and 1894, is the most lavish balcony in East Africa. And on a nearby lane the Freddie Mercury Museum remembers Farrokh Bulsara, born here in 1946 before the world knew him as Queen's frontman.
Islands, forest and beaches beyond the town
A twenty-minute boat ride away, Changu Island — Prison Island — never held a prisoner; its 1890s cells became a quarantine station, and today Aldabra giant tortoises descended from a 1919 Seychelles gift lumber among the ruins. Inland, Jozani Forest protects the endemic Zanzibar red colobus, roughly a thousand monkeys living in the island's only national park. And the beaches — Nungwi Beach in the far north with its dhow-builders and turtle lagoon, Kendwa's sunset sand, kite-blown Paje on the east coast — are an easy day trip on tarmac roads.
Getting around
Abeid Amani Karume International Airport is ten minutes south of Stone Town, and fast ferries from Dar es Salaam dock right on the old-town waterfront. Inside Stone Town everything is on foot; for the coast, hire a taxi or a dala-dala minibus. The cool, dry months of June to October are the most comfortable; the long rains fall from March to May.