Zanzibar City travel guide

Top 10 sights in Zanzibar City

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Moongateclimber · CC BY-SA 4.0

   House of Wonders

   A palace built in 1883 for Sultan Barghash and the first building in East Africa to have electric light and a lift, which is how it got its name. Part of it collapsed in 2020 and it is under reconstruction.

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2. 

   2© Luganosamwel · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Malindi Mosque

   One of the oldest mosques in Stone Town, standing near the harbour and rebuilt in 1834-35 on the site of a much older prayer house. Its cone-shaped minaret is one of only a handful of that form left in East Africa, and it falls within the UNESCO listing.

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3. 

   3© David Berkowitz · CC BY 2.0

   St. Joseph's Cathedral, Zanzibar

   The Catholic cathedral of Stone Town, built between 1893 and 1898 by French missionaries to a design based on Marseille cathedral, its twin spires visible from the harbour. It is still a working parish and the interior murals are original.

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4. 

   4

   HMS Pegasus

   A Pelorus-class cruiser of the Royal Navy sunk off Zanzibar on 20 September 1914 by the German cruiser Königsberg, which caught her stopped in the roadstead with her engines opened up for repair. Thirty-eight of her crew died and she is remembered in the town.

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5. 

   5© Willem van der Horst · CC BY 2.0

   Palace Museum

   A three-storey palace on the Stone Town seafront, built in the late 19th century for the sultan's family after the Anglo-Zanzibar war of 1896 destroyed the palace before it. Renamed the People's Palace in 1964, it became a museum in 1994, with rooms on Sultan Khalifa bin Harub and on Princess Salme, who eloped to Hamburg.

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6. 

   6© Willem van der Horst · CC BY 2.0

   Old Fort of Zanzibar

   A fort the Omanis built in the 1690s over the ruins of a Portuguese church, after driving the Portuguese out. Its courtyard now holds an open-air theatre and craft stalls, facing the seafront gardens.

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7. 

   7

   Forodhani Gardens

   A small park on the Stone Town seafront, in front of the old fort. At dusk it fills with stalls grilling seafood, and with boys diving off the sea wall for an audience.

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8. 

   8© This photo was taken by Anton Zelenov. Please credit this with : Photo : Anton Z · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Christ Church, Zanzibar

   An Anglican cathedral begun in 1873 on the site of the slave market, at the insistence of the missionaries who had campaigned to close it. The altar is said to stand where the whipping post stood, and a memorial to the trade is in the crypt.

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9. 

   9© LittleT889 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Ijumaa Mosque

   A Friday mosque in Stone Town, rebuilt in 1994 in a modern Swahili-Arabesque style. Zanzibar's mosques are mostly plain outside and hidden in the alleys, and this is one of the few with a visible front.

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10. 

    10© DidierTais · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Tippu Tip's House

    A house in the Shangani quarter that belonged to Tippu Tip, the ivory and slave trader who ran caravans deep into the Congo and died in 1905. It was divided into flats after the revolution and is not open, but the carved door remains.

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