Old Portuguese Arch

This guide to the Old Portuguese Arch in Zanzibar City starts with archaeologist Mark Horton's 2017 dig beneath the Old Fort courtyard, where his University of Bristol team found the foundations of two long-vanished churches instead of the Omani stonework they expected. It follows the Portuguese traders and Augustinian friars who settled this waterfront from the 1500s, the 1651 massacre that ended their church of Our Lady of Grace, and the second church that rose and fell before the Old Fort was built on top of it. Among the burials uncovered beneath the site was a man whose bones still carried a musket ball's mark.