Great Zimbabwe

Great Zimbabwe is the largest stone structure built in Africa south of the Sahara and the country takes its name from it. It was the capital of a Shona kingdom that traded gold and ivory to the Swahili coast and China between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, and it was abandoned before the Portuguese ever saw it. The Great Enclosure has a curved outer wall eleven metres high built of dressed granite blocks laid without mortar, and it still stands. Colonial administrations spent decades insisting Africans could not have built it, which is part of the site’s story.