Zanzibar 7 Day Itinerary: Stone Town, Paje and Nungwi

Free to enter the courtyard, 1 hour, 15 minutes by car from the airport. Start here after checking in: the lanes of Stone Town have no street signs, and the fort is the landmark everything runs from.

The Omanis raised these coral rag walls between 1698 and 1701, right after driving out the Portuguese, who had held the island for two centuries. The courtyard now holds an amphitheatre, craft stalls and cafes, and is where the city's festivals happen.

Quick stop, 20 minutes, 100 metres from the fort. The building has been closed and wrapped in scaffolding since part of the facade and the tower collapsed in December 2020, and restoration continues with support from the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

It is worth pausing for the scale of it: when Sultan Barghash built it in 1883 it was the first building in East Africa with electric light and a lift, and the largest on the Swahili coast.

Free to enter, 1h30, right next to the fort. Stalls go up around 6pm as the sun drops and stay until 9pm or 10pm. It is the cheapest and liveliest dinner in town.

Order the Zanzibar pizza, which is not a pizza: thin dough stuffed with minced meat, egg and cheese, folded and fried on a griddle. The rule that saves your stomach: eat what comes hot off the griddle, from the stall with a queue of locals, and be wary of seafood platters that have been sitting out for hours.

About 1h15, guide included in the ticket, open from early morning. The Anglican cathedral was built from 1873 directly on top of East Africa's largest slave market, closed that same year under British pressure on Sultan Barghash.

The altar stands where the whipping post was, used to test how much pain people up for sale could take. In the basement of a building next door, two chambers remain where dozens were held before auction, with ceilings too low to stand under. It is the hardest and most necessary visit on the island.

Quick stop, 30 minutes, 200 metres from the cathedral. Open since 1904, this is where the city shops: mounds of mango and rambutan, sacks of clove and cinnamon, and the fish hall at the back, which smells exactly as you are imagining.

Go in the morning, when the catch has just landed, and agree a price before accepting anything put in your hand.

About 4 hours including the boat, which leaves from the beach in front of Forodhani; island entry around 4 dollars plus the shared boat. Head out after lunch and be back for sunset.

The 1893 building was designed as a prison but never held prisoners: it became a quarantine station for ships carrying yellow fever. The real draw is the Aldabra giant tortoises, a gift from the British governor of the Seychelles in 1919, some more than a century old with their birth year painted on the shell.

Boats usually stop at the Nakupenda sandbank on the way, which disappears completely at high tide. Confirm with the boatman that the stop is included before you pay.

About 2 hours with a guide, 15 to 20 dollars per person, 25 minutes north of Stone Town. Leave at 9am with your bags in the car: the day ends on the east coast.

The guide scrapes bark off the trunk and holds it out to smell: cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, pepper, vanilla, annatto. Zanzibar was once the world's largest clove producer, planted with slave labour from the 1820s, and that monoculture shaped the island's economy until tourism arrived. Packaged spices sold at the end are good and cheap, but skip the soaps and oils at airport prices.

Entry around 10 to 12 dollars with the compulsory guide, 1h30, 30 minutes from Kizimbani and 20 from Paje. It is the only national park on Unguja, the main island.

The Zanzibar red colobus exists nowhere else in the world, and only a few thousand remain. They sit metres from the trail in troops, and guides ask for three metres of distance, both to protect you and to keep human disease away from them. The second half of the visit is a boardwalk over the mangrove, across the road.

Free, 2 hours, 15 minutes south of Paje. Go at low tide, when the women of the village wade into the lagoon to tend the stakes where red seaweed grows, sold to the cosmetics and food industries.

Seaweed farming is now one of the main sources of income for women on the east coast, and a community centre in Paje turns part of the harvest into soap. Walking through the village, between coral houses and beached boats, shows the Zanzibar that exists outside the resorts. Ten minutes away is Kuza Cave, a limestone cavern with turquoise fresh water and a Swahili cultural centre, which charges a couple of dollars and rarely makes it into itineraries.

Lunch around 30 to 50 dollars per person, 1h30, 30 minutes north of Paje at Michamvi Pingwe. Book days ahead and ask about the tide when you do: at low tide you walk across the sand, at high tide a small boat covers the 20 metres.

A dozen tables sit on a coral outcrop and the kitchen is essentially fish and seafood. You are paying for the setting rather than the cooking, and it is still worth one meal. If the price stings, eat on Bwejuu beach and come to look at the rock from the shore.

Free, the rest of the afternoon. Paje is the island's kitesurfing capital: the reef holds back the waves, the wind blows steadily from June to September and from December to March, and schools charge around 70 to 90 dollars for a private lesson.

If you are not sailing, understand the tide before complaining about the sea: at low tide the water pulls back hundreds of metres and the beach becomes a sand flat of pools and starfish; at high tide the turquoise pool returns. The two hours either side of high tide are the swimming window.

Free, 1 hour, an hour by car from Paje and 40 minutes from Nungwi. It is the natural stop on the transfer day, and the beach the Mnemba boats leave from.

Matemwe is a long fishing village with scattered hotels and no nightlife at all. The tide pulls back here too, but the view of Mnemba atoll on the horizon is the best on the island.

Free, 1 hour, on the northern tip. Dhows, the Arab sailing boats that have worked this coast for centuries, are still built here on the sand, without plans or factory nails, from mango wood and simple tools.

Ask before photographing anyone at work; a small tip is welcome. Next door are the late afternoon fish market and the boats that head out for sunset.

Free, late afternoon. The northern tip is the only part of the island where the tide barely moves the waterline: you can swim at any hour, which explains the concentration of hotels.

The other reason is the sunset, which here drops into the sea. Be on the sand between 6pm and 6.30pm, when the dhows sail out with the sun behind them and the photo takes itself.

About 4 hours, 35 to 60 dollars per person on a shared boat, plus the marine reserve fee. Leave at 8.30am from Nungwi or Matemwe, because the sea is flattest early and midday boats meet the wind.

The island inside the atoll is private, owned by a luxury lodge, and nobody lands: the trip is the reef around it, with butterflyfish, green turtles and, with luck, dolphins on the way. Bring sunscreen without oxybenzone and refuse operators who offer to chase dolphins for you to swim with, a practice Tanzania discourages and that stresses the animals.

Free, the whole afternoon, 10 minutes by car from Nungwi or a 40 minute walk along the beach at low tide. Kendwa is wider, deeper and calmer than Nungwi, and the sea has no rocks at the entry.

It is also where the island's full moon party happens, once a month, filling the beach. If you want quiet, check the date before booking; if you want the opposite, book around it.

About 1 hour including the nearby cave, a couple of dollars to enter, 45 minutes south of Nungwi on the airport road. Leave Nungwi at 9am with your bags.

The chamber was cut into the coral and roofed over, and was used to hide enslaved people after the trade was banned in 1873: ships kept arriving at night, far from the policed harbour of Stone Town. Going down the steps and seeing the size of the hole explains more than any text. A few minutes away is the natural Mangapwani cave, with fresh water the community still uses.

A couple of dollars to enter, 45 minutes, 4 km north of Stone Town and essentially on the airport road. Sultan Barghash had the palace built in 1882 for his household, with its own aqueduct and Persian style baths.

A fire destroyed it in 1899 and what remains are the stone columns, the reservoir and part of the baths, taken over by vegetation. It is a short stop, and the last of the route: the airport is 20 minutes from the gate.