Nairobi is one of Africa's most surprising cities: chaotic, modern, green and full of energy. Born just over a century ago as a simple British railway depot in the middle of the savannah, today it is a metropolis of skyscrapers, tech hubs —it's nicknamed 'Silicon Savannah'—, embassies and UN offices, and at the same time the great gateway to Kenya's safaris. Almost every traveller heading off to see lions in the Masai Mara or elephants in Amboseli passes through here.
What makes Nairobi unique is that you don't have to leave the city to start your safari: Nairobi National Park, right next to the centre, is the only park in the world with wild animals —lions, giraffes, rhinos, zebras, buffalo— in sight of the skyscrapers. Add to that heart-warming experiences like the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust's baby elephant orphanage, the Giraffe Centre where you hand-feed Rothschild's giraffes, and the home of writer Karen Blixen, author of 'Out of Africa'.
This guide explores Nairobi with a practical eye: what to see in the city and its national park, how to visit the elephants and giraffes, how to get around safely, where to eat a good 'nyama choma' (grilled meat) and how to use Nairobi as a logistics base for your safari. With one or two well-planned days, the Kenyan capital stops being a mere stopover and becomes a memorable part of the trip.
Nairobi didn't exist until 1899, when the British set up a camp and railway depot in a swamp on the plateau, at a cold-water spot the Maasai called 'Enkare Nyrobi', 'the place of cool waters'. From that Uganda Railway halt grew a city that within a few decades became the capital of the colony, the stage for the independence struggle and the Mau Mau uprising, and finally the capital of independent Kenya from 1963. Its story —from swamp to skyscraper, from colonialism to 'Silicon Savannah'— is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of Kenya: a capital born from a railway swamp, in the shadow of Mount Kenya, sacred mountain of the Kikuyu and the country's glacier-capped summit.
Read the history of Nairobi and the centre →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have over 10 activities in Nairobi. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Unlike almost every other great capital in the world, Nairobi is a very young city, with no medieval walls or ancient ruins: just over a hundred and twenty years ago, where its skyscrapers now rise there was nothing but a cold, swampy plain, crossed by a small clear-water river and roamed by herds of Maasai cattle. The Maasai, semi-nomadic herders who dominated these highlands, called the place 'Enkare Nyrobi', meaning 'the place of cool waters'. From that name, poorly transcribed by the British, came the word Nairobi.
Nothing suggested that this spot would become a metropolis. It sat at 1,795 metres above sea level, in a mild, healthy location between the Indian Ocean coast and the highlands of the interior, but it was simply a swamp in the middle of the savannah, with no settled population beyond the herders who crossed it with their cows. What changed everything was a colossal feat of colonial engineering: the railway the British were building from the port of Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean, into the interior of Africa, heading for Lake Victoria and Uganda.
That railway, begun in 1896, needed a place to set up a large depot, workshops and a camp before tackling the difficult climb into the highlands and the descent into the Great Rift Valley. The engineers chose precisely that plain of cool waters, for its climate, its water and its relatively flat ground. In 1899, that point on the railway line became a permanent camp. Nairobi was born, almost by chance, as a railway station in the middle of nowhere.
The camp grew at astonishing speed. Around it settled railway workers (many of them labourers brought from British India), traders, colonial officials and European settlers drawn by the fertile highlands. In just a few years, the settlement of huts and tents turned into a town with streets, shops and hotels. Malaria and flooding from the swamp even forced much of the town to be rebuilt on higher ground.
In 1905, barely six years after its founding, Nairobi was declared capital of the East Africa Protectorate, replacing Mombasa. The city thus became the administrative centre of the colony that in 1920 would be renamed Kenya. Capital status brought grand colonial buildings, English clubs, the racecourse and legendary hotels such as the Norfolk (1904), where hunters, aristocrats and adventurers stayed before setting off on safari.
That colonial Nairobi was also home to a deeply unequal, racially segregated society. British settlers took the best land in the highlands (the famous 'White Highlands'), displacing African communities, above all the Kikuyu and the Maasai. The city had elegant European neighbourhoods, commercial Asian districts and poor, overcrowded African areas. Writers and figures such as Karen Blixen, the Danish author of 'Out of Africa', who had a coffee plantation at the foot of the Ngong Hills, portrayed the splendour and the decline of that colonial world, glittering for a few and oppressive for most.
Anger over land seizures and discrimination erupted forcefully in the 1950s. In 1952, the colonial government declared a state of emergency in response to the uprising of the movement known as the Mau Mau, made up mainly of Kikuyu peasants who took up arms against British rule, demanding the return of their land and independence. Nairobi, with its overcrowded African districts, was one of the centres of that struggle and of the harsh colonial repression that followed.
The British response was brutal: thousands were killed, and there were mass arrests, detention camps and torture, in one of the darkest chapters of late colonialism in Africa. The so-called 'Operation Anvil' of 1954 swept through Nairobi and detained tens of thousands of people. Although the Mau Mau were militarily defeated towards the end of the decade, the insurgency decisively hastened the end of empire: it became clear that British rule was unsustainable.
One of the political leaders of the time, Jomo Kenyatta (accused, on disputed evidence, of leading the Mau Mau and jailed by the British), would become the great symbol of independence. On 12 December 1963, in a Nairobi stadium, the British flag was lowered for the last time and the flag of the new nation was raised: Kenya was finally independent, and Nairobi was its capital. Kenyatta was its first prime minister and later its president. The city that had been born as a colonial railway depot was now the heart of a sovereign country.
After independence, Nairobi went through decades of breakneck growth. From a colonial city of a few hundred thousand people, it passed one million in the 1980s, and its metropolitan area now has more than four million. It became the main economic, financial and diplomatic hub of East Africa, and in 1996 it was chosen as headquarters of UN-Habitat and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the only UN global headquarters in the southern hemisphere and in a developing country.
That explosive growth brought huge contrasts, which still define the city. Alongside well-off neighbourhoods such as Karen or Westlands, with embassies, shopping centres and mansions, some of the largest informal settlements in Africa grew up, such as Kibera, where hundreds of thousands of people live in very precarious conditions. Nairobi is both rich and poor, modern and chaotic, a mirror of the continent's tensions.
The city has also suffered international terrorism. On 7 August 1998, a truck bomb attack on the United States embassy in central Nairobi killed more than 200 people (almost all of them Kenyan) and injured thousands, in an attack attributed to Al Qaeda that simultaneously struck the US embassy in Dar es Salaam. Years later, in 2013, the terrorist assault on the Westgate shopping centre, carried out by the jihadist group Al Shabaab, left dozens dead and shocked the country. Nairobi learned to live with the threat without giving up its vitality.
In the 21st century, Nairobi has reinvented itself as one of Africa's great innovation hubs. The spread of mobile phones and, above all, the launch in 2007 of M-Pesa (the revolutionary Kenyan system for payments and transfers by mobile phone, now copied across half the world) turned the city into a fintech laboratory. The cluster of tech companies and start-ups that flourished in and around the city came to be called the 'Silicon Savannah', and major tech multinationals opened their Africa hubs here.
At the same time, Nairobi has modernised its infrastructure at great speed. In 2017 the SGR Madaraka Express high-speed train opened, linking the capital with Mombasa in a few hours, and in 2022 the Nairobi Expressway opened, an elevated toll road that crosses the city to ease its legendary traffic. The downtown skyline is filling with skyscrapers, and the urban middle class is growing alongside persistent problems of inequality, pollution and congestion.
And, in the middle of it all, Nairobi keeps its most famous oddity: Nairobi National Park, created in 1946, the only wildlife park in the world inside a capital city, where lions and rhinos graze with buildings in the background. City of cool waters, colonial capital, cradle of independence, UN headquarters and African tech laboratory, Nairobi sums up in its short but intense history much of modern Kenya and modern Africa: young, contradictory, dynamic and full of future.
