Tanzania Historical and Unesco World Heritage Sites

Tanzania is a country, which encompasses an astonishing history and a wealth of natural wonders; therefore it is no surprise that most sites have been listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Tanzania has a long history of human habitation stretching back to our most distant ancestors. The socalled ‘bantu migrations’, occurring between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago, brought agriculture and pastoral knowledge to the area as competing groups spread over the country in search of fertile soil and plentiful grazing for their herds.

European missionaries and explorers mapped the interior of the country by following wellworn caravan routes, including Burton and Speke who in 1857 journeyed to find the source of the Nile. Traditional ways of life remained largely intact until the arrival of German colonizers in the late 19th century. Around the 4th century AD, coastal towns and trading settlements attracted bantu-speaking peoples from the African hinterland. They settled around mercantile areas and often facilitated trading with the Arabs and Persians, who bartered for slaves, gold, ivory, and spices, sailing north with the monsoon wind.

Between the 13th and 15th centuries, the settlements of Kilwa Kisiwani and the Zanzibar Archipelago reached their peak, with a highly cosmopolitan population of Indian, Arab and African merchants trading in luxury goods that reached as far as China. The completion of Portuguese domination in 1525 meant that trade, for a short time, was lessened, but rival Omani Arab influences soon took control of the caravan routes and regained complete control of the islands, even going so far as to make Zanzibar the capital of Oman in the 1840’s.

In the late 19th century, British influence in the Zanzibar Archipelago, in contrast to German influence on the Tanzanian mainland, slowly suppressed the slave trade and brought the area under the influence of the Empire. Local rebellions in German East Africa, most notably the Maji Maji rebellion from 1905 to 1907, slowly weakened the colonizer’s grip on the nation and at the end of the First World War Germany ceded Tanganyika to English administration. Under the leadership of Julius Nyerere of TANU, popularly referred to as Mwalimu or ‘teacher’ Tanganyika achieved full independence in 1962. Meanwhile, a violent revolution in Zanzibar ousted the Omani sultancy and established a one-party state under the Afro-Shirazi party in 1963. A year later, the United Republic of Tanzania was formed, unifying the Tanganyika mainland with the semi-autonomous islands of the Zanzibar Archipelago, and merging TANU and the ASP to form CCM, Chama cha Mapinduzi, the Party of the Revolution which rules Tanzania to the present day.

The remains of two great East African ports admired by early European explorers are situated on two small islands near the coast. From the 13th to the 16th century, the merchants of Kilwa dealt in gold, silver, pearls, perfumes, Arabian crockery, Persian earthenware and Chinese porcelain; much of the trade in the Indian Ocean thus passed through their hands. Serious archaeological investigation began in the 1950s. In 1981 it was declared a World Heritage Site.

The Kilimanjaro National park is located near Moshi, Tanzania. It is centered on the iconic and dramatic snow clad slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, which covers an area of 753km (291 square miles). In 1973, the mountain above the tree line was classified as a National Park and was opened to public access in 1977, but it wasn’t until 1987 UNESCO listed the park as a World Heritage Site.

The Serengeti National Park is Tanzania’s oldest park, and one of the world’s last great wildlife refuges, hence its World Heritage Sites status. It is most famous for its annual migration of over one million white bearded (or brindled) wildebeests and 200,000 zebras. The park covers 14,763km (5,700 square miles) of grassland plains and savannah as well as forest and woodlands.

The Kondoa rock art site is a series of caves carved into the side of a hill looking out over the steppe. The cave site is 9km off the main highway from Kondoa to Arusha, about 20km north of Kondoa. The site has a spectacular collection of images from over 150 shelters depicting elongated people, animals, and hunting scenes.

The Selous Game Reserve covers a total area of 54,600km (21,081 square miles) and is one of largest fauna reserves of the world, located in the south of Tanzania. It was designated >>

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a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982 due to the diversity of its wildlife and undisturbed nature.

Humans and their distant ancestors have been part of Ngorogoro’s landscape for millions of years. The earliest signs of mankind in the Conservation Area are at Laetoli, where hominid footprints are preserved in volcanic rocks are over 3.6 million years old.

Stone Town or Mji Mkongwe in Swahili meaning “ancient town” is the old part of Zanzibar City. The old town is built on a triangular peninsula of land on the western coast of the island and was awarded World Heritage Site status in 2000.

Mysterious ruins of complex irrigation systems span the area around Engaruka, the remnants of highly developed but unknown society that inhabited the area at least 500 years ago – and then vanished without a trace.

The port town of Lindi in southwestern Tanzania, was the final top for slave caravans from lake Nyasa during the heyday of the Zanzibari sultans. In 1909, a team of German palaeontologists unearthed the remains of several dinosaur bones in Tendanguru, including the species Brachiosaurus brancai, the largest discovered dinosaur in the world.

Another central port in the Swahili Coasts network of the India Ocean trade. In the 15th century Mikindani’s reach extended as far as the Africa hinterlands of the Congo and Zambia. The area became a centre of German colonial administration in the 1880s and a chief exporter of sisal coconuts.

The most obvious historical site in Zanzibar is Stone Town, a world Heritage Site and the oldest continuously inhabited city in East Africa, but Zanzibar has much more to offer visitors. From the ruins of numerous places stemming from the Omani Sultan, ancient mosques (notably the oldest known Swahili text) Persian bathhouses, and colonial style), Zanzibar is an absolute treasure cove for the historically inclined.