Zanzibar's history is written in coral rag and carved teak: Omani sultans who ruled from Muscat to Kilwa, the clove plantations that fed the Indian Ocean slave trade, and a 38-minute war with Britain in 1896. Three days of it, on foot and by road.
Omani Arabs built this coral-stone fortress in 1699 on the ruins of a Portuguese church and trading post, after driving the Portuguese from Unguja. Later a prison and a railway terminus. Open daily 09:00–18:00; the amphitheatre inside hosts festivals.
Sultan Barghash's 1883 ceremonial palace was East Africa's first building with electric light and an electric lift. Part of it collapsed in 2020; restoration with UNESCO and Oman is ongoing, so the interior stays closed — the facade and clock tower still dominate Mizingani Road.
Sultan Barghash commissioned these public baths in the 1870s from Shirazi architect Hajji Gulam Hussein — hot and cold rooms, a barbershop, toilets and an aqueduct-fed cistern. No longer functioning, but the vaulted chambers and star-cut skylights survive intact.
The Malindi quarter holds Stone Town's oldest surviving mosque, with a rare conical minaret. Two minutes north, the Old Dispensary — built 1887–1894 by Indian merchant Tharia Topan as a charity hospital — carries the finest fretwork balconies in the archipelago.
Bishop Steere built Christ Church in 1873–1879 on the closed slave market; the altar marks the whipping post. Beneath the adjoining building, two holding chambers kept up to 75 people before sale. The Memorial to the Slaves by Clara Sörnäs stands in the yard.
On 27 August 1896 the Royal Navy shelled Sultan Khalid bin Barghash's palace from ships anchored here. It lasted roughly 38 minutes — the shortest war on record. The Beit al-Hukm palace burned; only the harem block, now the Palace Museum, survived.
The Sultans' residence from the 1830s until the 1964 revolution, holding the furniture of Sultan Barghash and the room of Princess Salme, who eloped with a German merchant in 1866 and wrote the first Arab woman's autobiography. Also closed for structural works — check locally.
Across the creek from Stone Town, East Germany built these long concrete slabs after the 1964 revolution that overthrew the Sultan and killed thousands of Arab and Indian Zanzibaris. The blocks are the physical legacy of Karume's socialist Zanzibar.
About 20 km north of town, a rectangular pit cut into coral rock held enslaved people after Britain forced the 1873 treaty banning the sea trade — the traffic simply went underground here until the 1890s. A natural cave nearby served the same purpose.
Sultan Barghash built Maruhubi in 1882 for his 99 concubines; fire gutted it in 1899. What remains are Corinthian-style columns, the great stone bath and the aqueduct channels running through overgrown mango trees, three kilometres north of Stone Town.
Sultan Seyyid Said built these in 1850 for his Persian wife Binte Irich Mirza, granddaughter of Shah Fath Ali. The stucco reliefs of birds, flowers and date palms inside the domed chamber are Qajar work — the only Persian decorative plaster on the island.
Shangani was the merchants' and consuls' quarter. At its heart stands the house of Tippu Tip, the Swahili-Zanzibari ivory and slave trader who controlled routes deep into the Congo. It is privately occupied and crumbling — the black-and-white marble doorstep is visible from the lane.