Great Zimbabwe

Great Zimbabwe is the ruin of a stone city in the hills of southeastern Zimbabwe, and it is the largest stone structure built in southern Africa before the colonial era. The site was settled from around 1000 AD, and from the 13th century it was the capital of a kingdom that grew rich on long-distance trade, not least in gold; its state may have covered some 50,000 square kilometres. The builders were ancestors of the Shona people. The city was abandoned in the 16th or 17th century. Its name, from the Shona for "houses of stone", was later taken by the country itself, and it has been a World Heritage Site since 1986.

The ruins fall into three groups built at different times. The Hill Complex, the oldest, occupied from the 11th to the 13th century, sits on a hill; from its Eastern Enclosure, where carved birds are thought to have stood, a boulder shaped rather like one of the birds looks out over the valley. Below is the Great Enclosure, built in the 13th and 14th centuries, whose outer wall runs for about 250 m and rises as high as 11 m, built of dry stone without mortar. Inside, between the inner and outer walls, stands the solid Conical Tower, about 5.5 m across and 9 m high, whose meaning is still debated. The Valley Complex, the youngest, occupied from the 14th to the 16th century, is divided into upper and lower ruins.

The most important finds were eight birds carved from soapstone on top of tall monoliths, probably representing the bateleur eagle, a messenger of the spirit world in Shona belief. One of them has become Zimbabwe's national emblem and appears on its flag. Excavations also turned up Chinese and Persian porcelain and glass beads, evidence of how far the city's trade reached, along with gold and copper ornaments, iron gongs and worked ivory.

The site's modern history is a lesson in how archaeology can be bent to politics. European antiquarians looted it from the 1890s to the 1920s, and colonial writers insisted that it could not have been built by Africans. Archaeologists such as David Randall-MacIver in 1905–06 and Gertrude Caton-Thompson in 1929 showed that it was, but the Rhodesian government later pressured museum staff to avoid saying so, and several leading archaeologists left the country. The African origin of Great Zimbabwe was accepted by scholars by the 1950s, and today the ruins are a powerful national symbol.

Getting there

The site is about 25 km from Masvingo, the nearest town and the usual base, and visitors come by road from there. The nearest international airport by straight line is Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo International Airport (BUQ) near Bulawayo, about 243 km away.