Stone Town, Zanzibar

1 · POSITION

Stone Town is the old city of Zanzibar, inscribed by UNESCO in 2000, and its architecture — Arab, Persian, Indian and European elements joined in a Swahili town — records the trading world of the western Indian Ocean. The register files it under Tanzania and reads it as part of Oman’s story: in 1824 Sultan Said bin Sultan moved his seat here from Muscat. [1]

2 · THE CAPITAL OF TWO COASTS

With the sultan’s move Stone Town became the capital of the Sultanate of Oman and Zanzibar. In the nineteenth century it was known above all for spices, chiefly cloves — and for the slave trade, which is part of the same record and is not left out of it. [1]

3 · THE BUILDINGS

The Old Fort, of the seventeenth century, is the oldest building in the town. The House of Wonders, built in 1883 and restored after the bombardment of 1896, was the first building in Zanzibar with electricity and the first in East Africa with a lift. The town’s carved doors carry its mixture in wood: round-topped in the Indian manner, rectangular in the Omani. [1]

4 · A PORT OF RECEPTION

The register reads the harbour as the meeting point of Muscat, the Swahili coast and India, and holds Stone Town beside Muttrah as the two ends of one Omani world; its hotels are filed under their own codes. [1]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ Checked on 22 October 2026. Coffee and incense were not found among the goods the sources name; cloves, ivory and the slave trade were, and the note now names cloves and the slave trade. The sultan’s move from Muscat is dated 1824 by one source and 1840 by another. The Old Fort is dated to 1699 and to the seventeenth century in the same source. [1–2]