The archipelago of Zanzibar and its Islands offer a variety of thrilling activities.🏝 We can assist you in selecting the best options by offering our suggestions and sharing insider knowledge of the island group. No matter the reason for your visit, whether it be a vacation, honeymoon, backpacking trip, or a trip with family or friends, Zanzibar Island has something to offer for everyone. Here are some top activities to consider during your trip. 🏄♂️
Unguja, also known as Zanzibar Island or simply Zanzibar, is the largest and most populated island of the Zanzibar archipelago, located in Tanzania. The island is 85km long and 30km wide, with an overall area of 1,666 square kilometers. It is located in the northern half of the archipelago in the Indian Ocean, about 59km south of the second largest island, Pemba. The island is surrounded by a number of smaller islands and islets, with only two of them, Tumbatu and Uzi, being inhabited. The ecology of the island is diverse with notable mammal species including the Zanzibar servaline genet, African palm civet, and Zanzibar red colobus. In June 2018, a leopard was caught on camera here, despite previously being considered extinct in Zanzibar for the past 25 years.
People have lived in Zanzibar for 20,000 years. The island became a base for traders voyaging between the African Great Lakes, the Somali Peninsula, the Arabian peninsula, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent. The island offered a protected and defensible harbor, so although the archipelago had few products of value, Omanis and Yemenis settled in what became Zanzibar City (Stone Town) as a convenient point from which to trade with towns on the Swahili Coast. They established garrisons on the islands and built the first mosques in the African Great Lakes Region.
During the Age of Exploration, the Portuguese Empire was the first European power to gain control of Zanzibar, and kept it for nearly 200 years. In 1698, Zanzibar fell under the control of the Sultanate of Oman, which developed an economy of trade and cash crops, with a ruling Arab elite and a Bantu general population. Plantations were developed to grow spices, hence the moniker of the Spice Islands. Another major trade good was ivory, the tusks of elephants that were killed on the Tanganyika mainland – a practice that is still in place to this day. The third pillar of the economy was slaves, which gave Zanzibar an important place in the Indian Ocean slave trade, the Indian Ocean equivalent of the better-known Triangular Trade. The Omani Sultan of Zanzibar controlled a substantial portion of the African Great Lakes coast, known as Zanj, as well as extensive inland trading routes.
Sometimes gradually, sometimes by fits and starts, control of Zanzibar came into the hands of the British Empire. In 1890, Zanzibar became a British protectorate. The death of one sultan and the succession of another of whom the British did not approve later led to the Anglo-Zanzibar War, also known as the shortest war in history. The islands gained independence from Britain in December 1963 as a constitutional monarchy. A month later, the bloody Zanzibar Revolution, in which several thousand Arabs and Indians were killed and thousands more expelled and expropriated, led to the formation of the People’s Republic of Zanzibar. That April, the republic merged with the mainland Tanganyika, or more accurately, was subsumed into Tanzania, of which Zanzibar remains a semi-autonomous region. Read more about Unguja or the history of Zanzibar on Wikipedia
People have lived in Zanzibar for 20,000 years. The island became a base for traders voyaging between the African Great Lakes, the Somali Peninsula, the Arabian peninsula, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent. The island offered a protected and defensible harbor, so although the archipelago had few products of value, Omanis and Yemenis settled in what became Zanzibar City (Stone Town) as a convenient point from which to trade with towns on the Swahili Coast. They established garrisons on the islands and built the first mosques in the African Great Lakes Region.
