Zanzibar City
— — the city the dhows still find before dawn.
Not only on a wall.
“Stone Town's coral-rag walls hold the heat through the long afternoon. Carved Zanzibar doors with Omani arches and Indian brass studs open onto courtyards a few feet from the lane. By dusk the smoke from the Forodhani grills carries down to the waterfront, and the dhows that crossed from Bagamoyo settle their lateen sails for the night.
Zanzibar City, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Zanzibar City sits on the western coast of Unguja, the larger of the two main islands of the Zanzibar Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, about 35 km east of mainland Tanzania. Its historic core, Stone Town, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000 for its layered Swahili, Arab, Persian, Indian and European architecture. Coral-rag walls and mangrove-pole ceilings face narrow lanes laid down under the Omani sultans, who moved their court from Muscat in 1840 and made the island the capital of their maritime sultanate.
The buildings are built from coral rag, fossilised reef quarried locally and bound with lime mortar, which holds rainwater badly but holds shade and cool exceptionally well. Above the lanes, more than five hundred carved wooden doors survive, each marked by the wealth and culture of the family that commissioned it: Omani arched lintels, Indian brass studs against elephants, Swahili rectangles with floral chains. The Old Fort, built by the Omanis around 1701 on the foundations of an earlier Portuguese church, anchors the seafront beside the House of Wonders.
The historic core is walkable in an afternoon and best explored on foot, as vehicles barely fit the lanes. The House of Wonders (Beit-al-Ajaib), built in 1883 for Sultan Barghash and the first building in East Africa with electricity and an elevator, partially collapsed in 2020 and remains under restoration. Forodhani Gardens fills with charcoal grills at sunset, with grilled prawn, octopus and the layered Zanzibar pizza. Direct ferries run from Dar es Salaam in about two hours; flights land at Abeid Amani Karume International, 7 km south of the city.