The first inhabitants of what is now Zimbabwe were hunter-gatherer peoples related to the San (Bushmen), who lived in the region for tens of thousands of years. Their most astonishing legacy is the rock paintings of the Matobo Hills and other granite massifs: hunting scenes, human figures and animals painted in rock shelters, some of them thousands of years old, forming one of the largest concentrations of rock art in southern Africa.
From the first millennium AD onwards, the great expansion of the Bantu peoples transformed the region. These newcomers were farmers and ironworkers who brought with them cattle, pottery and a new, settled way of life. From those waves descend the Shona-speaking peoples, who would become the country's majority group and the builders of the great stone cities.
By around the year 1000, Shona communities were already farming, raising cattle, smelting iron and gold, and trading with the Indian Ocean coast. The combination of good grazing land, gold deposits and access to the Swahili trade routes laid the material foundations for the states about to emerge on the plateau between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers.
Between the 11th and 15th centuries, near present-day Masvingo, Great Zimbabwe flourished as the capital of a powerful Shona kingdom and the largest stone structure in sub-Saharan Africa from before the colonial era. At its height, around the 14th century, it was the main city of a large state that may have housed between 10,000 and 18,000 people, with a ruling elite settled in the so-called Hill Complex and an imposing Great Enclosure crowned by the enigmatic Conical Tower.
Its curved granite walls, built from blocks fitted together without mortar, spread across almost 800 hectares. The kingdom's wealth came from cattle and, above all, from gold: Great Zimbabwe controlled the routes along which the metal from the interior reached the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean coast, such as Sofala and Kilwa, and from there the Arab, Persian, Indian and even Chinese worlds. Glass beads, Chinese porcelain and Arab coins found in the ruins prove that long-distance trade.
Around 1450 the city was abandoned, probably because the exhausted land could no longer feed such a large population, and perhaps because the gold trade shifted northwards. During the colonial era many Europeans refused to accept that Africans had built such a work and invented Phoenician or biblical theories; modern archaeology proved its Shona origin beyond any doubt. Today it is a World Heritage Site and a national symbol: the soapstone bird found at the site, the "Zimbabwe Bird", appears on the country's flag.
When Great Zimbabwe declined, the centre of Shona power moved north. According to tradition, around 1430-1450 a prince named Nyatsimba Mutota migrated to the Zambezi valley and founded a new kingdom, Mutapa, whose rulers bore the title Mwene Mutapa or Munhumutapa ("lord of the conquered lands"). The kingdom spread across much of present-day Mashonaland and continued to live off gold, ivory and trade with the coast.
The fame of Mutapa's gold —which in Europe fuelled the myth of King Solomon's mines and the legendary Ophir— drew the Portuguese. From the early 16th century, Portuguese merchants and adventurers sailed up the Zambezi from their bases in Mozambique, set up trading fairs in the interior and meddled more and more in the kingdom's politics, backing some claimants against others and imposing unequal treaties.
Over time the Portuguese established the prazos, huge semi-feudal estates along the Zambezi, and turned some munhumutapas into puppet rulers. Weakened by succession wars and foreign interference, the kingdom gradually broke apart over the 17th century. Its decline opened the way for a new Shona power born, precisely, out of resistance to the Portuguese.
In the late 17th century the Rozvi Empire arose, the last great Shona power before the European conquest. Its founder was Changamire Dombo, a former vassal of Mutapa who rebelled in the 1680s, built a powerful army and achieved something no other African ruler in the region had managed: he defeated the Portuguese and drove them off the inland plateau, pushing them back towards the Zambezi and the coast.
The Rozvi Empire —whose name is usually translated as "the destroyers"— dominated the south-west of present-day Zimbabwe through the Changamire dynasty for around a century and a half. It inherited the building tradition of its predecessors: the city of Khami, near the future Bulawayo, had been the capital of the Torwa State, and under the Rozvi the architecture of decorated stone terraces reached great refinement. It was a prosperous, militarised state that jealously guarded its independence from the Europeans.
The Rozvi Empire lasted until the 1830s, when it was overrun by a force coming from the south: the waves of Nguni peoples unleashed by the Mfecane, the great upheaval triggered by the rise of Shaka's Zulu kingdom. One of those groups would change the human map of the region forever: the Ndebele.
Around 1840 a new people arrived in the south-west of present-day Zimbabwe: the Ndebele (or Matabele), led by Mzilikazi, a former general of the Zulu king Shaka who had broken with him and fled north during the Mfecane. After years of migration and war across what is now South Africa, Mzilikazi settled his people in the region that would become known as Matabeleland and set up his court near the future Bulawayo.
The Ndebele organised a militarised, Zulu-style state based on regiments (amabutho) and cattle herding, and subdued or pressured many Shona communities in the highlands through raids for cattle and captives. That unequal relationship between the Ndebele of the south-west and the Shona of the north-east left tensions that colonial and post-colonial politics would know how to exploit.
When Mzilikazi died in 1868, he was succeeded, after a dispute, by his son Lobengula, who ruled from the new Bulawayo. It was during his reign that European gold prospectors, missionaries and concession-seekers began circling the Ndebele court. Lobengula tried to play his cards shrewdly, but he faced a new and voracious force: the imperialism of Cecil Rhodes.
The diamond and gold magnate Cecil John Rhodes dreamed of an unbroken British empire "from the Cape to Cairo", and the lands north of the Limpopo were his next prey. In 1888 his agents obtained the Rudd Concession from Lobengula, a document the Ndebele king believed was limited to certain mining rights but which Rhodes used to secure from London, in 1889, a royal charter for his British South Africa Company (BSAC).
In 1890 the BSAC's Pioneer Column —some 200 settlers escorted by hundreds of police— marched into Mashonaland and founded Fort Salisbury, today's Harare. In 1893 the First Matabele War broke out: the Company's forces, with their Maxim guns, defeated the Ndebele army; Lobengula fled and died in early 1894, and his kingdom was dismantled. The newly conquered land was named Rhodesia, in honour of Rhodes.
But the conquest was not a peaceful one. In 1896-1897 the Shona and Ndebele rose up together against the seizure of land and cattle, forced labour and colonial taxes, in a rebellion Zimbabweans remember as the First Chimurenga ("liberation struggle"). Spiritual figures such as the medium Nehanda Nyakasikana and the medium Kaguvi led the resistance; they were captured and executed in 1898, but Mbuya Nehanda became a heroine and a symbol, and her name would inspire the fighters of the liberation war three quarters of a century later.
In 1923 the BSAC gave up control and Southern Rhodesia became a British colony self-governed by its white minority. The regime rested on a system of segregation and land dispossession: laws such as the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 reserved the best land for European settlers and confined the African majority to overcrowded reserves, while denying them full political rights.
In 1965, to block the move towards African majority rule that decolonisation was driving, Prime Minister Ian Smith proclaimed the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the United Kingdom, on 11 November. Rhodesia became a pariah state, under international sanctions, determined to perpetuate white rule. The African response was armed struggle: the Second Chimurenga.
Two guerrilla movements led the liberation war: ZANU, with its armed wing ZANLA, linked mainly to the Shona and eventually led by Robert Mugabe, and ZAPU, with its armed wing ZIPRA, with an Ndebele base and led by Joshua Nkomo. From bases in Zambia and Mozambique, and tactically united in the Patriotic Front, they waged a war of attrition that, together with international isolation, made the regime unsustainable. The Lancaster House negotiations in London sealed, in December 1979, a ceasefire and the road to elections with universal suffrage.
In the February 1980 elections, Robert Mugabe's ZANU won clearly, and on 18 April 1980 the Republic of Zimbabwe was officially born, with Mugabe as prime minister. The flag displayed the Zimbabwe Bird, and the new state took the name of that medieval stone city. At first Mugabe preached a policy of racial reconciliation and greatly expanded education and healthcare, real advances that earned him international prestige.
But the dark side soon showed. Between 1983 and 1987, in the campaign known as Gukurahundi, the army's Fifth Brigade —trained by North Korea— cracked down with extreme violence on the Ndebele communities of Matabeleland and the Midlands, under the pretext of hunting "dissidents" linked to ZAPU: an estimated 20,000 people were killed. The crisis ended in 1987 with a Unity Accord that merged ZANU and ZAPU into ZANU-PF and established Mugabe as executive president, holding power with almost no checks.
The land question, frozen by the Lancaster House clauses, exploded in 2000 with the Fast Track Land Reform: thousands of white-owned farms were occupied and expropriated, often violently and without compensation. Agricultural output collapsed, the economy went into free fall and the government financed its deficits by printing money. The result was one of the worst hyperinflations in history: in November 2008 prices were soaring at astronomical rates and the central bank ended up issuing one-hundred-trillion Zimbabwe dollar notes. In 2009 the country abandoned its currency and adopted the US dollar to halt the disaster, within a unity government with Morgan Tsvangirai's opposition.
Mugabe clung to power for almost four decades, until in November 2017 a military coup forced him to resign; he was succeeded by his former vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa. Zimbabwe still struggles today with economic instability, the emigration of millions of its people and the unhealed wounds of its history, but it keeps an extraordinary heritage: Victoria Falls, the elephant herds of Hwange and Mana Pools, the ruins of Great Zimbabwe and a living, proud Shona and Ndebele culture.
The 6 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city, grew up on the heart of the Ndebele kingdom. King Lobengula had his capital here, in a royal town called koBulawayo, a name usually translated as "the place of slaughter" or "of the one who is persecuted", referring to the succession struggles that brought Lobengula to the throne. It was from here that the king tried, in vain, to hold back the advance of the British South Africa Company.
After the Ndebele defeat in 1893 and the burning of the royal town, the settlers founded colonial Bulawayo on its ashes in 1894. They laid it out with extraordinarily wide avenues (according to tradition, so that a wagon pulled by a span of oxen could turn right round) that still shape the city today, alongside colonial architecture from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Bulawayo became the great industrial and railway centre of Rhodesia and then Zimbabwe, home to workshops, factories and the important Natural History Museum, one of the best in southern Africa. As the capital of Matabeleland, the region with an Ndebele majority, it also bore the weight of the Gukurahundi in the 1980s, and it keeps a cultural identity of its own, proudly Ndebele, distinct from the Shona heartland of the country.
About 35 kilometres south of Bulawayo lies one of the most surreal landscapes in Africa: the Matobo (or Matopos) Hills, a sea of granite more than 2,000 million years old, worn into impossible shapes, with huge balancing rocks, smooth domes and stone castles. UNESCO declared the site a World Heritage Site in 2003.
These rocks hold one of the largest concentrations of rock art in southern Africa: the shelters of Nswatugi, Pomongwe and Silozwane preserve San paintings thousands of years old (hunting scenes, human figures, animals, the famous "running" giraffe), evidence of tens of thousands of years of human presence. For the peoples who came later, Matobo remained sacred land: it is home to the Njelele oracle shrine, linked to the cult of the supreme god Mwari.
Matobo is also a pantheon of modern history. The Ndebele founder Mzilikazi was buried in these hills, which his people considered the home of the spirits (Malindidzimu). Decades later, Cecil Rhodes chose the same place for his grave: on the summit of World's View, cut into the granite, lie Rhodes and those close to him, at a site that today sparks debate about colonial memory. The park also protects a notable population of white and black rhinos, and one of the highest densities of leopards and black eagles on the continent.
About 22 kilometres from Bulawayo stand the ruins of Khami, one of the country's great stone sites and yet one of the least visited. It was the capital of the Torwa State from around 1450 to 1650, in other words the city that inherited the power and building tradition of Great Zimbabwe after it was abandoned, and it was later tied to the rise of the Rozvi empire.
Unlike the massive walls of Great Zimbabwe, Khami stands out for its stone terraces on which the homes of the elite were built, decorated with striking geometric patterns (herringbone, chequerboard) running along the retaining walls. It is an elegant architecture, suited to hilly ground beside the Khami River. The city was a thriving trading centre: Chinese, German and Spanish objects have turned up among its ruins, proof that it was still connected to the gold and Indian Ocean routes.
Khami was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986, the same year as Great Zimbabwe. Being relatively forgotten makes it a quiet, evocative place to visit, where you can explore without crowds the memory of the Shona kingdoms that ruled this land between the fall of Great Zimbabwe and the arrival of the Ndebele.
Harare is a city born of colonial conquest. On 12 September 1890, the Pioneer Column of Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company raised the British flag on a Mashonaland plain and founded Fort Salisbury, named after the British prime minister Lord Salisbury. Around the fort grew the capital of Southern Rhodesia, laid out according to colonial hierarchies, with European neighbourhoods kept apart from African ones.
For almost a century the city was called Salisbury and was the political and economic centre of the white-minority regime, including the years of Ian Smith's UDI. Independence brought a change of name: in 1982, on Zimbabwe's second anniversary, Salisbury became Harare, after an old Shona chief, Neharawa, whose name was linked to the area.
Today Harare is a calm, leafy city, famous for the jacarandas and flamboyants that paint its avenues purple and red in spring. It is the seat of government, home to the National Gallery and to bustling craft markets, and the natural base from which most travellers start their journey around the country.
As the capital, Harare has been the stage for the great milestones of independent Zimbabwe. Its stadiums and squares celebrated the birth of the country in April 1980; in its government buildings were decided both the education and health expansion policies of the early years and the darkest episodes of the Mugabe era.
The city holds much of the country's cultural and university life. The National Gallery of Zimbabwe was key to the worldwide recognition of Shona stone sculpture (the so-called Shona sculpture movement), one of the most celebrated art forms of contemporary Africa, with figures carved in serpentine that are shown in museums around the world.
Harare has also been a barometer of the economic crises: the queues for fuel and cash during the 2008 hyperinflation, and the waves of emigration that drained the country of professionals, were felt especially hard in the capital. Even so, it remains a dynamic city, with a vibrant music and food scene.
About 90 minutes north-west of Harare, near the town of Chinhoyi, lies one of the natural wonders of the country's centre: a system of dolomite and limestone caves that hides the Sleeping Pool, a pond of cobalt-blue water so intense it looks unreal, fed by underground streams at a constant temperature.
The caves have a long human history. In the local language the pool is known as Chirorodziva, "the pool of the fallen", and tradition says it served as a hiding place and as the scene of bloody episodes during the 19th-century raids. The Shona chief Chinhoyi and his people used the caves as a refuge from Ndebele raiders coming up from the south, and the remains of their granaries were preserved there for a long time.
The explorer Frederick Courteney Selous described the caves for a European audience in 1888. In the 20th century they were protected as a park —first as a national park in 1955, later as a recreational park— and today they are a popular day trip from the capital and a sought-after spot for divers, drawn by the depth and astonishing clarity of the Sleeping Pool.
In the north of the Eastern Highlands, the Nyanga region shows an unexpected side of Zimbabwe: cool green mountains, high grasslands, trout rivers and pine forests that have little in common with the hot savannah found across the rest of the country. Here rises Mount Nyangani, at 2,592 metres the highest peak in Zimbabwe, and here the Mutarazi Falls plunge down, among the highest in Africa.
Nyanga also holds an archaeological puzzle. The whole region is covered in ancient stone structures: farming terraces on the hillsides, small forts and mysterious "pits", the work of communities that farmed and kept cattle in these mountains for centuries. These remains show that the Eastern Highlands were densely populated long before the Europeans arrived.
In colonial times, Cecil Rhodes fell for the beauty of Nyanga and bought a vast estate in the area, now part of the national park. The region became a mountain retreat for the settlers, with trout introduced into its rivers and the air of the Scottish Highlands, and it is still a favourite destination for hiking, fishing and taking it easy.
South of Nyanga, next to the border city of Mutare, rise the Bvumba (or Vumba) Mountains, whose name means "mist" or "drizzle" in the local language, and they live up to it: their peaks often wake up wrapped in mist rolling up from the valleys of Mozambique. These are the "mountains of the mist", a world of damp cloud forest, streams and gardens.
Bvumba is known for its botanical gardens, created in colonial times, and for its lush mist forest, one of the richest ecosystems in the country. It is a paradise for birdwatchers (it is home to rare species found only in these highland forests) and to the elusive samango monkey. From its viewpoints, on clear days, the view opens out over the plains of Mozambique on the other side of the border.
Nearby Mutare, capital of Manicaland province, is the largest city in eastern Zimbabwe and the gateway to the whole region. The mix of cool climate, forests and gardens has made Bvumba a peaceful retreat, very different from the bustle of the big safari parks, ideal for gentle walks and for spotting birds and butterflies.
At the southern end of the Eastern Highlands, on the border with Mozambique, rises the Chimanimani massif, a rugged world of quartzite peaks, deep valleys, waterfalls and caves that is the mecca of mountain hiking in Zimbabwe. Unlike the safari parks, here you walk: Chimanimani National Park is explored on foot, on treks of several days that lead to mountain huts and wild, beautiful landscapes.
The range forms the natural divide between Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and it has been a crossing point and frontier for centuries. Its slopes and caves hold rock art and traces of ancient settlement, and its unusual geology and isolation have produced remarkable biodiversity, with endemic plants that grow only on these quartzite heights.
Chimanimani saw the region's conflicts up close: guerrillas crossed these mountains during the liberation struggle, and later the Mozambican civil war left its mark on the border. Today it is above all a destination for lovers of mountains and unspoilt nature, one of the most remote and beautiful corners of the country.
Lake Kariba, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, was born of a major colonial engineering project. Between 1955 and 1959 the huge Kariba Dam was built across the Zambezi River, designed by the French engineer André Coyne and built by an Italian consortium, to supply electricity to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Once the dam was closed, the water rose between 1958 and 1963 until it formed a lake of about 5,000 square kilometres and more than 280 kilometres long.
The human cost was enormous. The valley that went under water was home to the Tonga (BaTonga) people, who for generations had farmed its banks and fished the river. Around 50,000 Tonga were moved off their ancestral land and resettled in drier, less fertile areas, an uprooting from which many communities never fully recovered and which remains an open wound.
Tonga tradition holds that the river is the home of Nyaminyami, the snake god of the Zambezi, who was cut off from his wife by the dam wall. When catastrophic floods struck during construction (in 1957 and again, even worse, in 1958), sweeping away equipment, bridges and lives, many saw in them the fury of Nyaminyami reclaiming his river. The snake god totem is still a powerful symbol of Tonga identity.
As the waters of the new lake rose, thousands of animals were trapped on hills that were turning into ever smaller islands. Between 1958 and 1964 the famous Operation Noah was organised, led by game ranger Rupert Fothergill, which rescued some 6,000 animals (from antelope and monkeys to rhinos and snakes), ferrying them by boat to the mainland, mostly to what would become Matusadona National Park on the southern shore.
Over time, Lake Kariba became an inland sea with a life of its own. A small sardine, the kapenta, was introduced and gave rise to a major fishing industry, and its shores filled with hippos, crocodiles and water birds. The dead trees rising ghostlike from the water, remnants of the drowned forest, give the landscape an unmistakable look.
Today Kariba is famous for its legendary red sunsets and for a relaxed style of safari: the houseboats that cruise the lake let you watch wildlife as you drift, fish for the fearsome tigerfish and see the sun sink behind the silhouettes of the dead trees. The dam is also still a key part of the electricity supply of Zimbabwe and Zambia, although droughts linked to climate change increasingly threaten its output.
Downstream from the dam, the Zambezi returns to its wild course and creates one of the most extraordinary places in Africa: Mana Pools National Park. Its name comes from mana, "four" in the Shona language, after the four large permanent pools the river left behind as it shifted its bed over thousands of years, and which become magnets for life in the dry season.
Mana Pools, together with the Sapi and Chewore safari areas, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984 for its outstanding natural value. When the waterholes inland dry up, elephants, buffalo, zebras, antelope and their predators gather on the banks of the Zambezi, under acacia and albizia woodland, in spectacular concentrations of wildlife.
What makes Mana Pools unique is that it is one of the few major parks in Africa where you can go on safari on foot, without a vehicle: walking among elephants, buffalo and lions, with expert guides, offers a closeness to nature that is almost impossible elsewhere. This is where the elephants that rear up on their hind legs to reach the seed pods in the trees became famous, the stars of countless documentaries.
In Masvingo province, in the south of the country, stands the monument that gave its name to the whole nation: Great Zimbabwe, the largest pre-colonial stone structure in sub-Saharan Africa. Between the 11th and 15th centuries it was the capital of a thriving Shona kingdom that was home to more than ten thousand people and controlled the gold trade between the interior and the Swahili ports on the Indian Ocean coast.
The site, which covers some 800 hectares, is divided into three areas: the Hill Complex, the oldest citadel, on a granite hill; the Great Enclosure, with its curved wall more than 250 metres around, built without mortar; and the Valley Ruins. Inside the Great Enclosure rises the Conical Tower, a solid stone cylinder whose exact meaning (a symbolic granary? an emblem of power?) is still debated.
During the colonial era, racism led many Europeans to deny that Africans could have built such a city, crediting it instead to the Phoenicians or the Queen of Sheba; the Rhodesian regime even censored archaeologists who argued for its African origin. Science settled the question long ago: Great Zimbabwe is the work of the ancestors of the Shona. At independence in 1980, the country took its name ("houses of stone") and adopted as its national emblem the Zimbabwe Bird, the soapstone figure found at the site that now sits on the flag.
A few kilometres from the ruins is Masvingo, the oldest colonial town in Zimbabwe. It was founded in 1890 by the British South Africa Company's Pioneer Column under the name Fort Victoria, and for a long time it was known simply as Fort Victoria or Nyanda. After independence it took its current name, Masvingo, which in Shona means precisely "forts" or "stone walls", a clear reference to the region's heritage.
The town is the natural base for visiting Great Zimbabwe and a service centre for a wide farming and cattle-ranching region in the south of the country. Nearby is Lake Mutirikwi (formerly Lake Kyle), a reservoir surrounded by a game reserve, which supplies the area with water and offers scenery of water and granite.
Masvingo sums up much of Zimbabwe's history: on this land rose the medieval kingdom that gave the country its identity, here the settlers built one of their first forts, and from here a whole province takes its name. It is, in many ways, the historic south par excellence.
In the far south-east of Masvingo province, on the border with Mozambique, lies the wild and remote Gonarezhou National Park. Its name means "the place of elephants" in Shona, and the fame of its big herds (and of its huge-tusked bulls) more than lives up to it. It is the second largest park in Zimbabwe, a rugged land of bushveld, rivers and rock.
Its best-known sight is the Chilojo Cliffs, an imposing wall of red sandstone rising above the Runde River valley which, lit up by the setting sun, is one of the most striking views in the country. Gonarezhou was protected as a game reserve in the 1930s and proclaimed a national park in 1975, although it stayed closed for much of the liberation war and the Mozambican civil war, and only fully reopened in the 1990s.
Today Gonarezhou is part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, an ambitious conservation project that links protected areas in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa (including the famous Kruger) so that wildlife can once again move along natural corridors without borders. Less crowded than other parks, it offers a raw, authentic experience of nature.
In the far north-west of the country, the Zambezi River plunges over a fault more than a kilometre and a half wide and drops into a chasm, throwing up a curtain of spray visible from dozens of kilometres away. Local peoples called it Mosi-oa-Tunya, "the smoke that thunders", a name that perfectly captures the roar and the perpetual mist of the largest sheet of falling water in the world.
On 16 and 17 November 1855, the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone was guided by Kololo men to an island on the edge of the falls, and became the first European to describe them. He renamed them Victoria Falls in honour of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, although he himself acknowledged that the African name was the rightful one. Livingstone dreamed of using the Zambezi as a "highway" to carry trade and missionary work into the interior of Africa.
Today Victoria Falls is a World Heritage Site and one of the seven natural wonders of the world, shared between Zimbabwe and Zambia. The town of the same name on the Zimbabwean side has become southern Africa's adventure capital: bungee jumping from the bridge over the Zambezi, rafting on the rapids, scenic flights and sunset cruises sit alongside the simple pleasure of watching the sheer power of the water.
Colonial history left its mark beside the falls. Cecil Rhodes, who never saw them in person, wanted his "Cape to Cairo" railway to cross the Zambezi right here, where the spray from the falls would splash the carriages. The Victoria Falls Bridge, an elegant steel arch, was completed in 1905 and still links Zimbabwe with Zambia, carrying trains, cars and nowadays bungee jumpers too.
The town of Victoria Falls grew up around the falls, and with it one of Africa's great tourist destinations from the early 20th century, with its iconic Edwardian-style Victoria Falls Hotel. Tourism became the area's livelihood, although it suffered the ups and downs of the liberation war and the country's economic crises.
The surroundings are a natural treasure too. On the Zimbabwean side, the small Victoria Falls National Park protects the rainforest fed by the perpetual mist, a unique ecosystem where palms and ferns grow in the middle of the dry bushveld. Elephants, buffalo and antelope roam the area, and it is not unusual to come across them in the streets of the town.
South of the falls lies Hwange National Park, the largest in Zimbabwe, with some 14,600 square kilometres of savannah, teak forest and Kalahari sands creeping in from the west. It was proclaimed a game reserve in the late 1920s and later a national park, and it takes its name from a local chief, Hwange (or Whange). Before it was protected, this land had been the hunting grounds of the Ndebele kings.
Hwange is above all elephant country: it is home to one of the largest African elephant populations on the continent, tens of thousands of animals, along with the Big Five (lion, leopard, buffalo, rhino and elephant) and a remarkable variety of antelope and predators. Because the park has no large permanent rivers, much of its wildlife depends on artificial waterholes pumped from boreholes, especially during the long dry season.
Those waterholes offer some of the best safari sightings in Africa: in the heat of the day, elephants, buffalo and whole herds gather to drink, kicking up golden dust. Hwange made headlines around the world in 2015, when a famous lion called Cecil, studied by Oxford researchers, was killed by a trophy hunter just outside the park, reigniting the global debate on hunting and conservation.
Hardly anything that happened to Zimbabwe happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
