Stone Town is one of those places you feel before you understand. Just turn the first corner and you are lost in a maze of coral-stone alleys where the sun falls in strips, carved wooden doors hide secret courtyards, the air smells of cloves and cardamom, and the call to prayer mingles with church bells and the buzz of the market. It is the old town of Zanzibar, a World Heritage Site, and the best living example of Swahili culture: that unique crossroads of Africa, Arabia, India and Europe that flourished for centuries thanks to Indian Ocean trade.
But Stone Town is not just beauty. It was the capital of a fabulously wealthy sultanate and also the largest slave market in East Africa, and that double memory — the splendour of the spice and ivory trade and the horror of slavery — lives side by side in its streets. Today you can walk the site of the former slave market and its memorial, visit the Old Fort and the House of Wonders, eat at the Forodhani night market by the sea and buy spices at Darajani, all within a handful of blocks steeped in history.
This guide covers Stone Town with a practical and respectful eye: what to see and in what order, how to arrive by ferry or plane, how to get around the island, what admission and tours cost, where to sleep and eat, and how to treat places of memory with the seriousness they deserve. It is the perfect gateway to Zanzibar before moving on to the beaches of Nungwi, Pemba Island or remote Mafia.
Stone Town was born and grew as a port of the Indian Ocean trade: for centuries, the monsoons brought Arab, Persian and Indian dhows that traded cloth and manufactured goods for ivory, spices and slaves from East Africa. In 1698 the sultans of Oman drove the Portuguese from the Swahili coast, and in 1840 Sultan Said bin Sultan moved his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar, drawn by the wealth of cloves and trade. The town became the region's greatest trading hub and, at the same time, the main slave market in East Africa, through which hundreds of thousands of people passed before the trade was abolished in 1873 under British pressure. In 1890 Zanzibar became a British protectorate; in 1896 it was the setting for the shortest war in history (about 38 minutes). After independence and the 1964 revolution, Zanzibar joined Tanganyika to form Tanzania. That past of sultans, merchants, slavery and cultural blending is what makes Stone Town unique today, and it is told in detail on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The spice archipelago: Stone Town and its Swahili, Arab and colonial history, the beaches of Unguja, green clove-growing Pemba and the reefs of Mafia.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Zanzibar was a sultanate or a tourist destination, the island was a stopover on one of the oldest trade routes in the world: the one linking East Africa with Arabia, Persia, India and, further still, China. The key was the wind. For half the year, the northeast monsoons pushed the dhows (sailing boats with triangular sails) from Arabia and India towards the African coast. For the other half, the southwest monsoons carried them back home. That seasonal rhythm of the winds turned the ports of the East African coast into essential meeting points, where traders from very different worlds spent months waiting for the monsoon to change.
That contact, going back more than a thousand years, gave rise to Swahili culture (from the Arabic sahil, 'coast'). This African, urban and Muslim civilisation flourished between the 8th and 15th centuries along the coastline, from present-day Somalia to Mozambique, in city-states such as Kilwa, Mombasa, Lamu, Pate and Zanzibar itself. The Swahili were Africans who embraced Islam and built cities of coral stone. They traded gold, ivory, skins and enslaved people from the interior of the continent for cloth, porcelain, glass beads and goods made in Asia. Their language, Kiswahili, is an African Bantu language with a rich vocabulary of Arabic origin, living proof of that cultural blending.
Zanzibar (from the Persian Zangi-bar, 'coast of the Blacks') held a privileged position: close to the mainland but protected by the sea, with good anchorages and fresh water. For centuries it was one more link in that network, until the arrival of new powers, first European and then Arab, launched it into the centre of western Indian Ocean trade.
The balance of the Indian Ocean was broken when the Europeans burst onto the scene. In 1498, Vasco da Gama sailed along the Swahili coast on his way to India, and over the following decades Portugal took the coastal city-states by force to control the lucrative trade in spices and gold. Zanzibar came under Portuguese influence, and the Portuguese built a chapel and a small settlement where the Old Fort stands today. Portuguese rule was harsh but shallow. The Portuguese wanted the trade, not to govern inland, and their presence was resisted again and again.
The decisive blow came from Arabia. The Omanis, skilled sailors and traders from the Persian Gulf, drove the Portuguese out of Muscat in 1650 and then chased them all along the African coast. In 1698 they captured Fort Jesus in Mombasa, which broke Portuguese power north of Mozambique. Zanzibar passed into the orbit of the Sultanate of Oman. On the ruins of the Portuguese chapel, the Omanis built the Ngome Kongwe, or Old Fort, in the early 18th century. It is the oldest surviving building in Stone Town.
During the 18th century, Zanzibar grew as an Omani trading base. But what would transform it for good was neither ivory nor gold. It was a plant the Omanis brought in from the Spice Islands: the clove. The clove plantations, worked by enslaved people, made Zanzibar and neighbouring Pemba the world's largest producers. That wealth would become the magnet that drew the sultan's court to the heart of East Africa.
The turning point came in 1840, when Sultan Said bin Sultan Al Busaid made an unusual decision: he moved the capital of his empire from Muscat, in Arabia, to Zanzibar, on the African coast. No other Arab ruler had moved his court to Africa. The reason was economic. Zanzibar produced most of the world's cloves and controlled the routes of the ivory and slave trade into the interior of the continent. The sultan understood that the future of his fortune lay in the African Indian Ocean.
Under Said and his successors, Stone Town enjoyed its golden age. The city filled with palaces, mosques, merchants' houses and consulates. Indian traders (many of them financiers), Omani Arabs, Persians, Europeans and Africans lived side by side in the same port. Merchants built coral-stone mansions with inner courtyards and the famous carved wooden doors that combined Arab, Indian and African motifs. Sultan Barghash, who reigned from 1870, modernised the city. He brought in running water, and in 1883 he had the Beit-al-Ajaib built. This 'House of Wonders' was the first building in East Africa with electricity and a lift.
Zanzibar became the largest trading centre in East Africa. Its caravans set out for the Great Lakes and the Congo in search of ivory, and European explorers (Burton, Speke, Livingstone, Stanley) left from here for the unknown interior. The city minted its own coins, hosted consulates of the great powers and had a dazzling cosmopolitan life. But all that prosperity rested on an atrocious foundation: the slave trade.
The history of Stone Town can't be told without naming the slave trade plainly. During the 19th century, Zanzibar was the largest slave market in East Africa. Caravans brought men, women and children from the interior of the continent, from present-day Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and the Congo, who had been captured in raids and wars. They walked hundreds of kilometres in chains, also carrying the ivory that would be sold alongside them, and huge numbers died on the way. The survivors were sold at the market in Stone Town and shipped to the clove plantations of Zanzibar and Pemba, and to Arabia, Persia and the Persian Gulf.
The figures are hard to pin down and vary between sources. Estimates suggest that tens of thousands of people were traded every year at the peak of the trade, and that hundreds of thousands passed through Zanzibar over the century. The market operated right in the centre of town. Before being sold, captives were held in crowded underground cells with barely any air or light. This has to be told without euphemisms: the prosperity of the sultans' Zanzibar was built, to a large extent, on the suffering of these people.
The pressure to abolish the trade came mainly from the United Kingdom, which waged a naval and diplomatic campaign against the slave trade in the Indian Ocean during the 19th century. After years of broken treaties, in 1873 Sultan Barghash, facing the threat of a British naval blockade, signed the decree that closed Zanzibar's slave market and banned the trade by sea. On the very site of the old market, the Anglican bishop Edward Steere had Christ Church Cathedral built. According to tradition, its altar stands where the whipping post used to be. Slavery as a legal institution was not fully abolished in Zanzibar until 1897. Today the site is a place of remembrance. A museum, the preserved cells and the monument of chained figures commemorate the victims and make sure they are not forgotten.
Towards the end of the 19th century, in the middle of the 'Scramble for Africa' among the European powers, Zanzibar fell into the United Kingdom's orbit. Under the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890, Germany recognised British control over the island, which became a British protectorate. The sultans kept reigning, but real power was in the hands of the British consul.
One famous episode dates from this period: the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 27 August 1896, considered the shortest war in history. When the pro-British sultan died, his nephew Khalid bin Barghash proclaimed himself sultan without London's approval. The British gave him an ultimatum, and when it ran out, the British fleet shelled the palace facing Stone Town. The fighting lasted about 38 minutes. Khalid fled, the palace lay in ruins and the British installed their own candidate. The House of Wonders, damaged in that bombardment, was rebuilt shortly afterwards.
The 20th century brought deep changes. Zanzibar gained independence from the United Kingdom in December 1963 as a constitutional monarchy under the sultan. But the new order reflected centuries of inequality. An Arab and Indian minority held the wealth and political power, while the African majority was left on the margins. In January 1964 the Zanzibar Revolution broke out. African militias overthrew the sultan and the Arab-led government in a violent uprising that left thousands dead and drove much of the population of Arab and Indian origin into exile or expulsion. It was a traumatic event, and sources document its acts of ethnic revenge in stark detail. A few months later, in April 1964, Zanzibar united with Tanganyika (the mainland, independent since 1961) to form the United Republic of Tanzania, keeping a broad degree of autonomy.
In 2000, UNESCO added Stone Town to the World Heritage List. The committee noted that the city is an outstanding, well-preserved example of a Swahili trading town on the East African coast. Its street layout and its fabric of buildings survive almost intact, and few places reflect so clearly the blending of African, Arab, Indian and European cultures over more than a thousand years. Stone Town's architecture is the physical evidence of that blending: its coral-stone houses, carved doors, mosques, Hindu temples, churches and bazaars.
The recognition also brought responsibilities and challenges. Many historic buildings, made of coral stone and lime, suffer from age, sea humidity and lack of maintenance. The most painful case was the House of Wonders. In December 2020, part of this iconic building collapsed, a symbolic blow for the whole city. Since then, restoration work has been under way with support from the Sultanate of Oman (which stresses its historical ties with Zanzibar) and UNESCO. In 2026, however, the building was still closed with no firm reopening date. The episode opened a debate about how to fund and manage the conservation of such fragile heritage.
Today Stone Town is both a living city and an open-air museum. Its streets bring together the bustle of Darajani market, Quranic schools, cafés where people play bao, craft workshops and a growing tourism industry. Tourism drives the economy but also causes tension: gentrification, rising prices and pressure on services. Stone Town is the gateway to Zanzibar's beaches and, for many travellers, the cultural heart of the archipelago. One curious fact links past and present: in one of these houses, in 1946, Farrokh Bulsara was born, the boy the world would come to know as Freddie Mercury. Stone Town has been a crossroads of civilisations for a thousand years and is still a place where the Indian Ocean becomes a city.
