Culture, design & architecture

Built in the late 1600s and rebuilt by the Omanis, now a cultural centre with an open-air amphitheatre, craft stalls and music most evenings.

An Anglican cathedral built in the late 1890s on the site of Zanzibar’s largest slave market, with a memorial sculpture and a museum on the slave trade.

Public baths built for Sultan Barghash between 1870 and 1888 by Shirazi builders. No longer in use, partly open to visitors.

A 1890s building with carved wooden balconies and stained glass, restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

The 1883 sultan’s palace, once the first building in East Africa with a lift. Much of it collapsed in 2020 during restoration; see it from the seafront.

A late 19th-century seafront palace showing the life of the sultans’ family.