Zanzibar Spice Tours
Working visits to the clove, nutmeg, cinnamon and vanilla plantations inland of Stone Town that gave Zanzibar its old name as the Spice Islands.
Zanzibar spice tours walk you through a planted garden north of Stone Town where clove, nutmeg, cinnamon and vanilla grow side by side. This guide covers what you will actually see, why the farm is a demonstration plot rather than a plantation, how the clove economy was built, and where the islands cloves really grow today.
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Spice Tours Guide in Tanzania
What a Zanzibar spice tour actually is
A spice tour is a guided walk through a planted garden a short drive north or east of Stone Town, lasting two or three hours, during which a guide pulls up roots, strips bark, cracks pods and hands things round to be smelled and tasted. Somewhere along the way a young man goes up a coconut palm. At the end there is a plate of cut fruit, a stall selling spices and oils, and usually a Swahili lunch if the half day has been extended.
It is the single most booked excursion on Unguja, and it is genuinely enjoyable. It is also consistently mis-sold, in a way that produces the same disappointment in review after review. Two hours of honesty at the start of this guide should prevent that.
The farm is a demonstration garden, and that is worth knowing first
The places visitors are taken are small demonstration plots, planted so that several dozen species grow close enough together for a guide to walk you round all of them in an afternoon. They are teaching gardens. One of the best known even describes itself as a demonstration spice farm in its own listing, and operator descriptions routinely call the destination a small plantation.
Visitors who arrive expecting rolling clove estates say so afterwards, repeatedly, and it is the most common complaint about the whole activity. The complaint is really about expectation rather than about the garden, because a demonstration plot is a much better way to see thirty plants in two hours than a real plantation would be. A commercial clove farm is trees of one species, and most of the year there is nothing happening on it.
So the useful frame is this: a spice tour is a botanical tour, not an agricultural one. You are there to learn what a nutmeg looks like inside its fruit, what cinnamon is before it is a stick, and that vanilla is an orchid. You are not there to see an industry. The industry is elsewhere, and the rest of this guide explains where.
What you will see growing
The reliable staples of a Zanzibar spice tour are clove, nutmeg with its crimson lace of mace wrapped round the seed, cinnamon shown as the inner bark of a living tree, black pepper, cardamom, turmeric, ginger, lemongrass, tamarind, chilli, coriander and allspice. Vanilla is shown as a climbing orchid, and the point usually made is that the green pods are useless until months of curing turn them into anything you would recognise.
Alongside the culinary plants there are the ones grown for other purposes: henna, ylang-ylang, and the annatto or lipstick tree, whose seed pods produce a red pigment that guides invariably use to paint someone's hand. The fruit at the end typically includes jackfruit, breadfruit, soursop, custard apple, pineapple, mango, papaya and, in season, durian.
One correction worth carrying. Some tours claim to grow saffron. Zanzibar does not grow saffron, which is a temperate highland crop; what is being shown under that name is almost always turmeric or annatto. It is a small thing, but a guide who tells you the truth about that is likely telling you the truth about the rest.
How Zanzibar became the Spice Island
Cloves are not native to Zanzibar. They arrived around 1812, and the plantation economy that followed was deliberately created.
Saʿīd ibn Sulṭān, the Omani ruler usually known as Seyyid Said, first visited Zanzibar in 1828 and acquired clove-growing property. In 1840 he moved the capital of his empire from Muscat to Zanzibar. He recognised that the islands suited the crop, and he pursued the labour required to grow it at scale.
That labour was enslaved. The large-scale clearing of land for clove plantations correlates closely with the greater availability of cheap enslaved labour following the Moresby Treaty of 1822, and the work the plantations required, weeding, picking, drying and stemming, drove imports upward. By 1842 the average annual import of enslaved people into the sultanate was reported at around fifteen thousand.
This is not a footnote to the spice tour. It is the reason the spice tour exists. The islands are fragrant because a monarch decided they would be and because thousands of people were forced to make it so, and a visitor is better served by knowing that than by being handed a story about exotic aromas. There is no need for atmosphere or drama in the telling. The fact is sufficient.
Zanzibar's dominance did not last. Production ran at around sixteen thousand tonnes in the 1970s and fell to somewhere between fifteen hundred and three and a half thousand tonnes through the 2000s. Indonesia is now overwhelmingly the largest producer, and consumes almost all of its own crop in its clove cigarette industry rather than exporting it.
Where the cloves actually are now
Here is the thing no ranking page mentions. Most of Zanzibar's cloves do not grow on Unguja, the island where nearly every spice tour runs. They grow on Pemba, the quieter northern island. Published figures for Pemba's share range from a little over half to around eighty per cent depending on the source and the year, so no single number should be trusted, but the direction is not in dispute.
The crop is also almost entirely in the hands of smallholders, on scattered plots rather than visitor-facing estates, and it is marketed through a single state body. The Zanzibar State Trading Corporation holds the legal monopoly on buying cloves, underpinned by a Clove Marketing Law dating from 1985 that has not been repealed. Academic work characterises the resulting market as a monopsony: many small growers, one buyer.
Farmer advocacy research has documented what follows from that, including persistent smuggling of cloves in and out of the islands, driven by informal channels that pay growers more than the official price. One detail from that research is worth repeating because it says a great deal in a few words: the researchers were unable to complete a cost-benefit analysis of the state corporation because its management declined to provide the data.
The corporation, for its part, describes its mandate as developing, processing and distributing the national commercial crops and building a global brand for clove and essential oils. Both accounts belong on the page. Neither is the whole picture, and a visitor should hear them together rather than either alone.
A small but genuinely interesting footnote to all of this: the Kizimbani area, the most frequently named spice tour destination on Unguja, is also the site of a government agricultural research centre founded in 1934 to study commercial crops and cloves in particular. It is still a working institute. The teaching garden you are walked round has a research station for a neighbour.
The sites that come attached to the tour
Spice tours are routinely bundled with one or more nearby historical sites, and the bundling is more coherent than it looks.
The Kidichi Persian Baths were built in 1850 by Seyyid Said for his Persian wife, a granddaughter of the Shah of Persia. They are Persian in style, with decorative stucco and an underground furnace to heat the water, and unusually for a building in an Islamic context the relief work includes clear depictions of birds and flowers. The reason they stand at Kidichi, out in the country rather than in town, is that the sultan's clove plantations were there and the couple used the place when overseeing them. That is the link between the baths and the spice farm, and it is almost never explained.
The Maruhubi Palace ruins, just north of Stone Town, were built by Sultan Barghash between 1880 and 1882 and destroyed by fire in 1899. What survives is the stone columns that carried the upper balcony and a Persian-style bathhouse.
The Mangapwani slave chamber on the north-west coast is a cell cut into coral rock, used to conceal enslaved people after the legal trade had been abolished, in use roughly between 1880 and 1905. If it appears on your itinerary, it should be visited as what it is. It belongs to the same history as the plantations: the chamber exists because the plantations did. It is covered properly, with the other sites of that history, under slave trade history tours.
Stone Town itself, and the wider coastal culture the spice trade produced, is covered under Swahili cultural tours.
Choosing a tour, and the tipping problem
Two structural things about how spice tours are sold cause most of the friction.
The first is that operators generally do not say in advance which garden you will be taken to, which makes it impossible to compare. Ask. A named destination is a reasonable thing to request and the answer tells you how the trip is put together.
The second is tipping. Visitors consistently report being expected to tip several people separately at the end: the guide, an assistant, the person who climbed the coconut palm, whoever wove the palm-leaf items, and whoever served the fruit. One traveller described handing money to five different people. This is not a scam, and the people involved are working, but it is not usually explained beforehand and it catches people without small notes. Ask before you go who is customarily tipped, and carry small denominations.
On the coconut climber: opinion divides sharply and both reactions are common. Some visitors enjoy it, some find watching a man climb a tree for their entertainment uncomfortable. There is no obligation to applaud, and there is no obligation to film it.
Group size matters more than anything else on this activity. On a large tour the guide is inaudible at the back and the plants get passed round rather than examined. A small group changes the experience completely, because a spice tour is essentially a long conversation with someone who knows plants.
Buying spices
There is a stall at the end of every tour, and buying from it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Two practical notes from people who have done it.
Visitors frequently report that the same spices are cheaper in Stone Town's market than at the farm gate, so there is no need to buy under pressure at the end of the walk if you would rather look around first. Against that, buying where you were shown the plant is a more direct transaction, and the packaging is usually better suited to travel.
- Whole spices keep far better than ground ones. Whole nutmeg, cinnamon quills and cardamom pods will still be good in a year; ground turmeric will not.
- Vanilla pods should be pliable rather than brittle. A brittle pod has been sitting a long time.
- Check what your own country allows you to bring in. Plant material rules vary and seeds in particular are frequently restricted.
- Soaps, oils and perfumes are widely sold alongside the spices and travel well, but essential oils in hand luggage are subject to the usual liquid limits.
What to wear, and when to go
The gardens sit in rural villages that are conservative and predominantly Muslim, and visitors frequently ask what is appropriate. Cover shoulders and knees. Long trousers or a long skirt and a sleeved top are right for both men and women, and they also help with mosquitoes and with the low branches. Closed shoes are better than sandals on ground that is often muddy.
Mornings are cooler and the gardens are quieter earlier in the day. The tours run year round, and although the long rains from March to May make the paths muddy, they also make everything green and aromatic. Those are the islands' long rains specifically, since Zanzibar keeps the northern circuit's calendar rather than the southern coast's. Cloves are harvested around the middle of the year, so a visit then may coincide with drying mats laid out, though a demonstration garden's rhythm does not track the commercial harvest closely.
During Ramadan, eating and drinking in front of people who are fasting is discourteous, and the fruit tasting may be handled differently. It is worth asking how the tour runs during that month rather than assuming.
Questions travellers ask
Is it a real spice farm?
It is a real garden with real plants, tended by real growers, but it is a demonstration plot rather than a commercial plantation. Several of them describe themselves that way. Expecting an industrial-scale estate is the single most common cause of disappointment, and the garden format is genuinely better for seeing many species in one visit.
Where do Zanzibar's cloves actually grow?
Mostly on Pemba rather than Unguja, and mostly on scattered smallholdings. Published estimates of Pemba's share vary considerably, but it is the larger producer. The spice tours almost all run on Unguja.
How long does a spice tour take?
Typically two to three hours for the garden itself, or a half day once transfers, a historical site and a Swahili lunch are added. Full-day versions usually add a beach or a further ruin.
How much tipping is expected?
Amounts are not something this guide covers, but the structure is worth knowing: several people are customarily tipped separately rather than one guide at the end. Ask your operator beforehand who is usually tipped, and bring small notes.
What should I wear?
Cover shoulders and knees. The gardens are in conservative rural villages. Closed shoes, and clothes you do not mind getting muddy or stained, since annatto and turmeric both mark.
Can I do a spice tour from a beach resort rather than Stone Town?
Yes, and most operators collect from the east and north coasts, though it adds a good deal of driving to the day. The gardens themselves are concentrated in the country north and east of Stone Town.
Is a spice tour suitable for children?
It suits them well. It is a short walk, most of it involves smelling, tasting and touching, and the coconut climb and the fruit at the end tend to land better with children than with adults.
Should I buy spices at the farm or in town?
Travellers commonly report the market in Stone Town being cheaper for the same goods. Buying at the garden is more direct and the packaging is usually better for travelling. Either is fine; there is no need to buy under pressure at the end of the walk.