Kampala's history sits in the ground: royal tombs on grass hills, a ditch where a king killed his siblings, a palace armoury turned torture block. Three days trace the Buganda kingdom, the 1886 martyr killings and the coups that followed.
Every Kabaka since Kintu, Buganda's first king, has been crowned on this hill 14km southwest of the centre. Guides walk you through the coronation hut, the wrestling ground and the ritual where the new king is told to rule long.
A three-metre circular earthwork where Kabaka Kalema penned and then killed his royal brothers and sisters in 1888 to hold the throne during Buganda's religious wars. The ditch survives intact under scrub and fig trees.
The 1888 thatched tomb of Kabaka Suuna II, who ruled Buganda before Europeans reached the kingdom and fathered a reported 218 children. Bark-cloth curtains screen the burial spot; his jawbone was kept apart, per Ganda royal custom.
Africa's largest hand-dug lake, ordered by Kabaka Mwanga II in 1886 as a secret escape channel toward Lake Victoria and abandoned unfinished when the wars broke out. Roughly two square kilometres of water below the Lubiri.
The Kabaka's walled palace, occupied since 1885, stormed by Obote's troops in 1966 and made an army barracks by Amin. Guides lead you into the underground armoury cells where thousands died; messages scratched by prisoners survive.
Buganda's parliament of 1958 faces the palace down a dead-straight ceremonial mile planted with 52 trees, one for each Ganda clan. Only the Kabaka may use the central lane; everyone else keeps to the flanking roads.
Uganda's largest mosque sits on the hill where Frederick Lugard raised his 1890 fort — the site that gave the city its name. Guides take you up 304 minaret steps and name all seven original hills from the balcony.
Gregory Maloba's bronze of a mother lifting an unbound child marks midnight on 9 October 1962, when the Union Jack came down. It stands beside Constitution Square, colonial Kampala's whites-only recreation ground.
Between 1885 and 1887 Kabaka Mwanga II had 45 Christian converts executed; 13 Catholics were burned at this spot on 3 June 1886. A copper-domed basilica on 22 pillars covers the pyre site, with the Anglican shrine on the facing hill.
Prince Nuhu Mbogo, exiled leader of Buganda's Muslim faction after the 1888 religious wars, was granted this hill on his return. His descendants completed the mosque in 1951 and his grave lies inside the compound.
Opened as a technical school in 1922, Makerere trained much of independent Africa's first leadership. The 1941 Main Building — the Ivory Tower — burned in September 2020 and was rebuilt; the campus gallery holds Uganda's modernist canon.
The fourth church on this hill, finished in 1919 in local red brick after its predecessors burned or collapsed. Bishop James Hannington's remains, brought here in 1892, lie inside, and a drum in the tower still calls the congregation.