Nairobi travel guide

Top 10 sights in Nairobi

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   1© The original uploader was Mkimemia at English Wikipedia. · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Nairobi National Park

   A park established in 1946 seven kilometres from the centre of Nairobi — the only national park inside a capital city anywhere. Its southern boundary is open to the plains, so game moves in and out, and rhino graze against a skyline of office towers.

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   2© Kreuzschnabel · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Kibera

   The largest informal settlement in Nairobi, about seven kilometres from the centre, whose name comes from the Nubian word for forest. Sudanese soldiers of the King's African Rifles were allotted land here in 1912, and the settlement grew round them without ever being formally recognised.

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   3© Karl Ragnar Gjertsen Krg This photo was taken by Karl Ragnar Gjertsen. Plea · CC BY-SA 3.0

   National Museums of Kenya

   The state body that runs more than twenty museums and hundreds of sites across Kenya, with its headquarters and main galleries on Museum Hill in Nairobi. Its hominid fossils from Lake Turkana are among the most important found anywhere.

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   4© mwanasimba from La Réunion · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Cathedral Basilica of the Holy Family

   The Catholic cathedral of Nairobi and a minor basilica, seat of the archdiocese. The first church on the site, built in 1904, was the earliest stone building in the city, put up when Nairobi was still a railway camp of tents and tin.

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   5© Rod Waddington · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Karen Blixen Museum

   The farmhouse below the Ngong Hills where the Danish writer Karen Blixen lived from 1917 to 1931, running a coffee estate that failed. She wrote Out of Africa about it in 1937; the house is furnished as she kept it.

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   6© Robin Hutton · CC BY 2.0

   Nairobi Railway Museum

   A museum beside Nairobi station holding the locomotives and carriages of the Uganda Railway, built inland from Mombasa from 1896. Among them is the coach from which a lion took a railway superintendent in 1900.

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   7© Queen Asali · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Gigiri

   A leafy northern suburb built around the United Nations Office at Nairobi, seat of UNEP — founded in 1972 — and of UN-Habitat, which make Nairobi the only African city hosting UN programmes of that rank. The US embassy, several other missions and the Village Market complex stand here.

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   8© Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Nairobi National Museum

   Kenya's largest and broadest museum, opened on 22 September 1930. Its motto is "Where heritage lives" and it gathers the country's natural history, culture and art under one roof.

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   9© DEMOSH from Nairobi, Kenya · CC BY 2.0

   Uhuru Park

   Thirteen hectares of park beside the business district, opened by Jomo Kenyatta in 1969. In 1989 Wangari Maathai fought off a plan to build a sixty-storey party headquarters on it, was beaten and jailed for doing so, and took the Nobel Peace Prize fifteen years later.

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    10© Alexander Leisser · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Bomas of Kenya

    A village at Langata reconstructing the homesteads of Kenya's main peoples, with one of the largest auditoriums in Africa attached. Dancers perform every afternoon, and it is the quickest honest introduction to a country of more than forty language groups.

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   1© No machine-readable author provided. Hdahlmo~commonswiki assumed (based on copyr · CC BY 2.5

   Giraffe Centre

   A conservation centre at Lang'ata founded in 1979 to save the Rothschild's giraffe, of which only a few hundred then remained. A raised platform brings visitors level with the animals' heads, which is how the feeding is done.

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   2© Bahnfrend · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Jamia Mosque

   The main mosque of Nairobi, on Banda Street in the city centre, founded in 1902 and built between 1925 and 1933 with three silver domes and twin minarets. It is the centre of the city's Muslim community.

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   3© Luide Kakembo · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Uhuru Gardens

   Twenty-eight hectares at Langata, and the place where the Union Jack came down and the Kenyan flag went up at midnight on 12 December 1963. A monument and a museum of the independence struggle stand on the ground where it happened.

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   4© SuSanA Secretariat · CC BY 2.0

   Korogocho

   One of Nairobi's largest informal settlements, holding 150,000 to 200,000 people in about 1.5 square kilometres northeast of the centre. It began as a shanty town on what was then the city's edge; a 2009 count ranked it fourth largest after Kibera, Mathare and Mukuru kwa Njenga.

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   5© Ahero dala · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Nairobi Arboretum

   Thirty hectares of woodland laid out in 1907 to test which foreign timber species would grow in Kenya, and now a park in the middle of the city. Colobus and vervet monkeys live in it and joggers use it at dawn.

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   6© Jorge Láscar from Australia · CC BY 2.0

   Jeevanjee Gardens

   A public garden in the centre of Nairobi, given to the city in 1906 by an Indian merchant and contractor who had built much of the early town. It is the only park the citizens themselves own, and there have been repeated attempts to build on it.

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   7© Around The Globeसत्यमेव जयते · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, Nairobi

   A Hindu temple begun as a congregation in 1932 and built in 1945, and the first Swaminarayan temple raised outside the Indian subcontinent. It serves a Gujarati community that came with the railway and has been in Kenya for over a century.

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