Zanzibar City/Coast
In 1592, the first English ship arrived in port. In 1824, Said bin Sultan, Sultan of Muscat and Oman established the capital of his kingdom in the city.[9] The city was a high place of slavery, one of the main ports of East Africa for the slave trade. The famous slave trader Tippu Tip lived there. In 1846, the island had 360,000 enslaved for 450,000 inhabitants. In 1866, the British explorer David Livingstone (1813–1873) stayed in Zanzibar to prepare his last expedition to Tanzania. In 1892, Zanzibar was declared a free port.
Zanzibar City comprises two main parts, Stone Town and Ng’ambo (literally: “The Other Side”); the two areas were historically divided by a creek since filled in, with the street on the Stone Town side of the creek originally called Creek Road but later renamed to Benjamin Mkapa Road. Stone Town is the historical core of the city, the former capital of the Zanzibar Sultanate; because of its unique architecture and culture, it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000. Ng’ambo is a much larger, modern area that developed around Stone Town after the Zanzibar Revolution, with office buildings and large apartment blocks such as those of the Michenzani neighbourhood.[5] Zanzibar City is served by a number of international and domestic airlines via Abeid Amani Karume International Airport.
As a primary trading post on the spice, silk and slave trade routes for over a millennium, Zanzibar has been a uniquie cultural crossroads, blending Africa, Indian, Arabian and European cultures, this is most apparent in the Old Stone Town, one of the few remaining ancient towns in Africa.