Zanzibar Spice Tour

You are collected from Stone Town or your hotel and driven twenty to forty minutes inland to the Kizimbani or Kidichi area, where the plantations have been in production since the nineteenth century. A local guide walks you through the plot, stopping at each tree and vine: you crush a leaf, scrape bark, split a green nutmeg to find the scarlet mace inside, dig up a root of turmeric. It is a sensory tour rather than an academic one, and it lands with almost everyone, children included. See our Zanzibar travel guide for how a spice morning fits the wider trip.

Along the way someone will weave you a hat and a tie from palm fronds, and a young man will climb a coconut palm barefoot, singing, to cut one down for you. Both are set-pieces, both are genuinely enjoyable, and both are tipped, carry small notes.

The tour usually ends with a fruit tasting under a tree and, if you have booked it, a Swahili lunch: pilau or biryani rice, coconut fish curry, chapati and fresh juice, cooked in the farm kitchen. This is the part we insist on. The spices make sense only when you eat them.

Cloves arrived from the Moluccas in the early nineteenth century, and Sultan Seyyid Said moved his court from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1840 largely because the islands proved so suited to growing them. Within decades Zanzibar and Pemba supplied the majority of the world's cloves, and the plantation economy that produced them was built on enslaved labour brought through the same port that shipped the spice.

That is the uncomfortable other half of the story, and a good guide will tell it. The slave market site in Stone Town and the plantations north of it are two ends of the same history, which is why the spice tour and a proper Stone Town walk belong on the same day, in that order, and why our island food guide covers the same spices from the kitchen side.

Spice tours range from genuinely educational farm visits to twenty minutes of leaf-sniffing followed by an hour of hard selling. The difference is the operator, not the price.

Ask three questions before booking. Is the tour on a working farm or a demonstration plot? Does it include a lunch cooked on site: the Zanzibari pilau or biryani that follows a good tour is often the best meal of the trip? And is the group small enough to hear the guide? A morning start is strongly preferable: it is cooler, the light is better and the afternoon heat in a plantation is punishing.

Expect a shop at the end. Buying is fine and supports the farm; do not feel obliged to buy the whole stall. Prices for spices are usually reasonable, and vanilla and cloves travel well. Small tips for the young men who climb the coconut palms and weave the palm-leaf hats and jewellery are customary.