Great Zimbabwe
Masvingo Province, Zimbabwe
The eleventh-to-fifteenth-century stone capital whose walls gave Zimbabwe its name, once explained away by colonial writers and now a UNESCO site still visited for its ancestral weight.
Great Zimbabwe is a dry-stone city of the Shona, built and inhabited from the eleventh to the fifteenth century: the Hill Complex on the granite kopje, the Great Enclosure with its patterned walls and Conical Tower below, and a valley settlement between them, all fitted stone without mortar. Soapstone birds from the site are national symbols on Zimbabwe''s flag, and the state named itself after the city at independence in 1980.
The ruins carried a political argument for a century: Rhodesian-era writers attributed them to Phoenicians or the Queen of Sheba rather than to Africans, and the attribution was publicly dismantled by David Randall-MacIver in 1906 and Gertrude Caton-Thompson in 1929. Shona ancestral regard for the site continues, recorded in scholarship on ceremony and the kings'' ancestral home, and the site museum presents the archaeology plainly. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (1986), and the entrance fee covers the museum.
Visiting
The National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe site lists hours (8am to 4:30pm daily) and the monument entrance fee (US$15 international adults, US$8 children, in cash); the site is 27km from Masvingo, and guides are hireable at the gate.
Photo: Conical Tower and Great Enclosure, [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conical_Tower_-_Great_Enclosure_IV_%2847561215932%29.jpg), CC BY-SA 2.0, Andrew Moore.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories