Stone Town
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How it came to be
Stone Town, on the west coast of Unguja in the Zanzibar archipelago, grew from Shangani, a small fishing settlement founded in the 11th century. The Portuguese built a church there in the early 16th century, and after they were driven out in the 17th century the Omanis built a fort that took in part of the church.
In the first half of the 19th century Sultan Said bin Sultan moved his seat from Muscat to the town. It flourished as a centre of the spice trade, above all cloves, and of the Indian Ocean slave trade, and merchants from Oman, Persia and India settled there. Its coral-stone houses keep carved wooden doors and stone benches called baraza, and the House of Wonders, built in 1883, had the first lift in East Africa.
In 1861 Zanzibar split from Oman as an independent sultanate, and in 1890 it became a British protectorate. The revolution of 1964 removed the sultan, and that year Zanzibar joined Tanganyika to form Tanzania. UNESCO inscribed Stone Town in 2000 as a fine example of the Swahili trading towns of the East African coast.
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