Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, is usually the traveller's first impression of the country, and it's a friendly one: a calm city of wide avenues lined with jacarandas, flowering parks, leafy residential suburbs and a mild highland climate that is rarely oppressive. It's called the 'Sunshine City'. It doesn't have the great natural icons of Victoria Falls or the wildlife of Hwange, but it's a good place to land, acclimatise and get a feel for Zimbabwe before heading off on your adventure.
Founded in 1890 as Fort Salisbury by the Pioneer Column of Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company, Harare was the colonial capital of Southern Rhodesia for almost a century. Only in 1982, two years after independence, did it take back an African name. That dual heritage shows in its museums and markets: the colonial architecture of the centre on one side, the thriving Shona and Ndebele culture on the other. Above all, it shows in the city's extraordinary tradition of stone sculpture, one of the best-known forms of African art in the world.
This guide takes a practical look at Harare: what to see in a day or two, where to admire Shona sculpture at the National Gallery and Chapungu Sculpture Park, how to see wildlife without leaving the city at Mukuvisi Woodlands, how to get around safely, and how to use the city as a logistics base to start your trip or make a getaway to the Chinhoyi Caves. With good planning, Harare stops being a mere stopover and becomes a warm introduction to the country.
Harare was born on 12 September 1890, when the Pioneer Column of Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company raised the British flag and founded Fort Salisbury on Shona land, naming it after the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury. That military outpost grew into the capital of Southern Rhodesia, the setting for almost a century of colonial and white-minority rule, until Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980. In 1982 the city was renamed Harare, after the Shona chief Neharawa, linking its pre-colonial past with its African present. Its full story is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of Zimbabwe: the capital grew out of a Pioneer Column fort, among jacaranda-lined gardens, and just a short trip away lies the impossible blue of the Chinhoyi Caves.
Read the history of Harare and the centre →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before there was a city, the Mashonaland highveld where Harare stands today was the land of the Shona people, Bantu-speaking farmers and herders who had been working these fertile, temperate highlands for centuries. The region was part of the vast cultural world that, centuries earlier, had produced the kingdom of Great Zimbabwe and the states that followed it, such as the Mutapa kingdom and, later, the Rozvi. It was a landscape of villages, sorghum and millet fields, cattle and granite outcrops.
In the specific area of what would become Harare, Shona communities lived under different local chiefs. One of them, Chief Neharawa, whose name would eventually give rise to the word 'Harare', had his settlement on a granite hill — the 'kopje' — overlooking the surrounding plain. 'Harare' is believed to come from 'haarari', an expression referring to someone who 'does not sleep', perhaps because of the watch kept from that hilltop. Nothing in those villages suggested that within a few decades they would become the capital of a country.
By the late 19th century, however, the Shona world was about to be turned upside down. To the south, in the diamond and gold mines of South Africa, British imperialism and the ambition of one man — Cecil John Rhodes — were looking to push north of the Limpopo River, towards lands that legend said were full of gold. The Shona highveld, and with it Neharawa's kopje, was in their sights.
In 1889, Queen Victoria granted a royal charter to Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company (BSAC), authorising it to colonise and commercially exploit the territories north of the Limpopo. To carry out that occupation, Rhodes organised the so-called Pioneer Column: an expedition of around 200 armed settlers and several hundred mounted police, guided by the hunter Frederick Selous, which marched north across the territory to take possession of Mashonaland.
On 12 September 1890, the column reached the foot of the granite kopje, next to a stretch of marshy ground, and decided to stop there. The next day, 13 September, they raised the British flag and founded a military post they named Fort Salisbury, in honour of Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister of the time. That date — remembered for decades by the settlers as 'Pioneers' Day' — marks the birth of the future Harare, and also the start of the colonial occupation of what would come to be called Rhodesia.
The founding of Salisbury was not an arrival in empty land: it was the seizure of land inhabited by the Shona, who were soon displaced and subjected to taxes, forced labour and dispossession. In 1896-1897 the First Chimurenga broke out, the great uprising of the Shona and Ndebele against the BSAC, which was harshly crushed. That resistance, though defeated, would remain as the seed and symbol of the liberation struggles that came almost a century later.
The settlement grew quickly. Malaria and flooding in the original marsh forced much of the town to move to higher, drier ground, and Salisbury began to take shape as a city, with streets laid out in a grid, brick buildings, shops and hotels. In 1897 it gained municipal status, and the arrival of the railway from Beira (on the coast of Mozambique) in 1899, and later from Bulawayo, connected it to the world and cemented its role as an administrative and commercial centre.
In 1923, the BSAC gave up control of the territory and Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing British colony, with Salisbury as its capital. The city became the political heart of a white-minority regime: European settlers controlled the government, the best land and the economy, while the African majority was pushed into reserves, segregated neighbourhoods and poorly paid work. Salisbury had leafy, elegant residential suburbs for whites and overcrowded 'townships' for Africans, such as Mbare (then called Harari).
In 1953, Salisbury reached its colonial peak when it was named capital of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which joined present-day Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. It was a time of economic boom and grand buildings, but the Federation, rejected by the African majority, was dissolved in 1963. Two years later, in 1965, Ian Smith's white-minority government unilaterally declared Rhodesia's independence from the United Kingdom to block the move towards Black majority rule. The hardest years were about to begin.
The 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence turned Rhodesia into a pariah state, under international sanctions and ruled by a white minority determined to hold on to power. Against that regime, the African nationalist movements — Robert Mugabe's ZANU and Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU — organised an armed struggle, known as the Second Chimurenga or the Rhodesian Bush War, a long and bloody conflict fought mainly in the countryside throughout the 1970s.
As the capital, Salisbury was the seat of Ian Smith's regime for the whole war, but it felt the conflict too: attacks, tension and growing isolation. The combination of guerrilla warfare, sanctions and international pressure finally brought the regime to its knees. After the Lancaster House Agreement in London, elections were held under universal suffrage, and Mugabe's ZANU won by a wide margin.
On 18 April 1980, the Republic of Zimbabwe was officially born, independent and under African majority rule, with Salisbury as its capital and Robert Mugabe as prime minister. Two years later, in a highly symbolic gesture, on 18 April 1982 — the second anniversary of independence — the city stopped being called Salisbury and took back an African name: Harare, in honour of the Shona chief Neharawa, who had lived on that kopje before the pioneers arrived. Also in 1982, the National Heroes Acre, the great monument to those who fell in the liberation struggle, was opened in the city.
The first years of independent Harare were full of optimism and growth. Zimbabwe inherited a relatively developed economy, and the capital expanded with new neighbourhoods, universities and a thriving cultural life, fuelled by 'chimurenga' and jit music, world-renowned Shona sculpture and a lively press. With its jacarandas and mild climate, the city earned its reputation as the 'Sunshine City'. But shadows soon appeared: between 1983 and 1987, the campaign of repression known as Gukurahundi hit Matabeleland above all, and power became increasingly concentrated in Mugabe's hands.
The big break came from 2000 onwards, with the chaotic land reform that expropriated commercial farms, economic collapse and staggering hyperinflation that by 2008 had become one of the worst in world history, leaving Zimbabwean dollar notes worthless. Harare suffered shortages, service cuts and crumbling infrastructure. In 2005, the controversial 'Operation Murambatsvina' razed the city's informal settlements and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. The economy only stabilised when the country effectively adopted the US dollar in 2009.
In November 2017, after 37 years in power, Robert Mugabe was pushed out by a military move and internal pressure, during days when Harare saw huge demonstrations. He was succeeded by Emmerson Mnangagwa. In 2024, the country launched a new gold-backed currency, the ZiG, in yet another attempt to stabilise the economy, although the dollar is still the dominant currency in everyday life. Today Harare is a city of contrasts: the capital of a country still dealing with economic hardship, but also a vibrant cultural hub, home to artists, musicians and sculptors, with flowering gardens, bustling markets and warm, welcoming people. In little more than a century it went from a marsh beside a granite kopje to the metropolis it is today: young, battered and resilient.
