Zanzibar travel guide

An Indian Ocean island off the Tanzanian coast with a thousand years of trade behind it — and a coastline where the difference between a good beach day and a strange one is the tide table.

Where you actually are

Zanzibar is an archipelago; the island almost everyone means is Unguja, with Pemba to the north. It is a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, a short flight or ferry crossing from Dar es Salaam, and small enough to drive across in a couple of hours. Most trips split in two: Stone Town for the history, one stretch of coast for the water. Which coast you pick matters more here than on most islands, for reasons covered below.

Plenty of people arrive after a mainland safari, and the pairing works — bush first, sea second, because nobody wants to leave the beach for a 5am game drive. If you are weighing it against a shorter-haul option, our Sicily guide covers the trip you can reach in a morning; the trip planner will show what a long-haul week costs against your budget before you commit either way.

Stone Town

Stone Town is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it is one of the few places where the phrase "cultural crossroads" is a description rather than a flourish. This was the hub of Swahili coast trade, tied by monsoon winds to Oman, Gujarat and the Persian Gulf, and its architecture is the literal stack of that: Arab merchant houses with internal courtyards, Indian shopfronts with overhanging balconies, Portuguese-era fortifications, and everywhere the coral-rag stone that gives the town its name and its crumbling texture. In the nineteenth century the Omani sultanate moved its seat here, and the town's grandest buildings date from that period.

The carved doors are the thing people photograph, and they repay knowing what you are looking at. The older Omani style has a squared frame and dense Quranic and floral carving; the Indian-influenced doors have rounded, arched tops and brass studs — a defensive detail borrowed from India, where the spikes were against elephants, and kept here as decoration. Doorframes were commissioned before the house was built, and the amount of carving is a statement about who lived behind it.

The slave market and the cathedral

Zanzibar was one of the principal markets of the East African slave trade, and its wealth — the clove plantations, the merchant houses, the sultanate itself — was built on it. The Anglican cathedral stands deliberately on the site of the last open slave market, its altar placed where the whipping post stood. Beneath the adjacent building, the holding chambers survive: low, airless rooms where people were confined before sale. There is a memorial in the churchyard of figures in a pit, wearing real chains.

It is not a stop to fit between a spice tour and lunch. Go with time, and preferably with a guide who can tell you how the trade worked, who ran it, who profited, and how long it took to end — the Zanzibar trade continued for decades after abolition elsewhere. The museum attached to the site does this properly. The rest of the town reads differently afterwards, which is the point.

Around the old town

The Old Fort and the seafront gardens sit next to each other, and Forodhani Gardens turns into a night market after dark: grilled seafood on skewers, Zanzibar pizza — a thin dough folded around egg and meat and fried on a griddle — and sugarcane juice pressed in front of you. It is touristy and it is also where families come. Some of the grand seafront buildings, including the House of Wonders, have been closed for structural restoration in recent years, so check what is open rather than building a day around one of them. Otherwise, get lost on purpose; the lanes are too narrow for cars and you will reach the water eventually.

The coasts, and the tide

This is the single most useful thing to know before booking accommodation. On the east coast — Paje, Jambiani, Bwejuu — the tidal range is dramatic. At low tide the sea withdraws hundreds of metres to the reef, leaving a shining flat of sand, seagrass and rock pools that people walk out across, with women farming seaweed in rows. It is beautiful. It is also not swimming, and it happens twice a day, every day. Nobody tells you this before you arrive, and it is the number one surprise on the island.

Paje is the kitesurfing centre: the reef makes a flat, shallow lagoon that is close to ideal for learning, and the wind blows reliably in two seasons, roughly December to March and again around June to September. Off Matemwe, the reef around the Mnemba atoll is the best-known snorkelling and diving on the island — the atoll itself is private, but the water around it is where the boats go. For the short-haul version of the same idea, see our quiet beach destinations in Europe.

Inland: spice farms and Jozani

The spice farms are a real part of the island's history rather than an invented attraction — cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, pepper and vanilla shaped the plantations inland. A good tour is a walk through a working smallholding where you are handed leaves, bark and seed pods to crush and smell, and it is far more interesting than it sounds on paper.

Jozani Forest, part of Jozani-Chwaka Bay National Park, protects the last significant stand of native forest and the Zanzibar red colobus, a monkey found nowhere else. They are habituated and usually easy to see, and there is a mangrove boardwalk across the road. Keep your distance — you are asked not to approach or feed them, for the animals' sake.

Dhow trips run from several points: sunset sails out of Stone Town, and day trips from the southwest across Menai Bay to sandbanks that appear and disappear with the tide. Changuu, better known as Prison Island, has a colony of giant Aldabra tortoises.

Travelling here respectfully

Zanzibar is predominantly Muslim, and this is not a background detail. Beachwear belongs on the beach and at your hotel. In Stone Town, in villages and on public transport, cover shoulders and knees — that applies to men as well as women, and a light scarf or a kanga bought locally solves it in the heat. Topless sunbathing is not acceptable anywhere. Ask before photographing people. This is the kind of thing that costs you nothing and changes how you are received entirely.

During Ramadan the rhythm of the island shifts: many local restaurants close during daylight, hours change, and eating or drinking openly in the street in the daytime is poor form even though hotels continue to serve. It is still a good time to visit if you go in knowing that. A few words of Swahili go a long way — karibu is welcome, asante is thank you, habari? is how are you, and mambo is answered with poa.

When to go, and practicalities

Two rainy seasons shape the year: the long rains, roughly March to May, when some hotels close and the humidity is heavy, and the short rains around November, which are usually brief afternoon downpours rather than washouts. The drier, cooler stretch from around June to October and the hot, clear window from late December into February are the reliable periods. It is close to the equator, so temperatures stay warm year-round; what changes is the rain and the humidity — which is what makes it a genuine winter option, alongside the rest of our warm winter destinations.

Tanzania drives on the left, and the currency is the Tanzanian shilling, though tourism services are frequently priced in US dollars. The international airport sits just outside Stone Town; getting around means taxis agreed in advance, hotel transfers, or dala-dalas, the shared minibuses locals use. Entry requirements, vaccination rules and any yellow fever certificate requirement depend on your nationality and on which countries you have passed through before arriving — check the current official requirements for your own route well ahead of booking, rather than relying on what a guide, or this page, said last year.

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