Zanzibar is often called the Spice Island, but almost none of its signature spices are actually native to it — they were introduced and then grown here at scale: vanilla from Mexico via the Portuguese, cloves from Indonesia via Arab traders, nutmeg from India. Cinnamon, cardamom, lemongrass, turmeric and ginger all thrive in the island's climate too. Zanzibar's real historical claim is clove — for a long stretch of the 19th century, it was the world's largest producer.
A Short History of the Spice Trade Here
In 1698, Omani Arabs pushed the Portuguese out of Zanzibar, gradually extending control along the East African coast. By 1840, the Sultan of Oman had moved his seat from Muscat to Zanzibar, using the island as the base for an expanding trade empire — one built substantially on slave labor. Sultan Said bin Sayyid needed large numbers of enslaved workers for dozens of newly established clove and date plantations, and the wealth the spice trade brought the sultans, which was well known in Europe at the time, would not have existed without it.
The Sultanate survived under British protection until Zanzibar's independence in December 1963. The last Sultan, Jamshid, remained in power for only about a month before the revolution.
On the night of 12 January 1964, during Ramadan, resentment among the African population erupted against the Arab and Indian elite, and the revolution killed a large number of people — estimates run into the thousands. The following day, the "People's Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba" was declared, and it joined Tanganyika shortly afterward to form the United Republic of Tanzania. Sultan Jamshid and much of the Arab and Indian population fled.
After the revolution, the Sultan's plantations and those of Arab landowners were nationalized, clove production was pushed harder — especially on Pemba — and a large share of the land was eventually redistributed to small-scale farmers. Pemba became the main clove-growing island, at the cost of much of its original forest cover. Global clove prices later fell sharply, though, and Zanzibar's share of the world market shrank with them.
Most spice farms open to visitors today sit roughly 20 km northeast of Stone Town. They grow far more for local sale and for the popular spice tours than for export, letting guests see the plants themselves and learn how each spice is grown, harvested and processed.
The Spices, One by One
Clove
Cloves are the nail-shaped flower buds of the clove tree — an evergreen up to 8–12 m tall (the name comes from the French clou, "nail"). They're picked by hand twice a year by workers climbing the trees, then dried in the sun for three to four days until they turn dark brown. Cloves flavor meats, curries and marinades across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and go into mulled wine and baking in Europe.
Traditionally, clove oil has also been used topically for toothache and mouth or throat inflammation, and in small amounts for digestive complaints — though the evidence for most of these uses is thin. It's also used to sedate fish for handling, and in Indonesia's kretek cigarettes, which blend tobacco with clove for a menthol-like note. Through the 19th century, cloves were — after enslaved people — the single most valuable export of Zanzibar's Omani-era economy. A hurricane in 1872 wrecked much of the clove industry on Zanzibar island itself, but Pemba's plantations largely survived, and Pemba clove remains valuable today.
Cinnamon
Cinnamon is the inner bark of several related trees, native to Sri Lanka, the Malabar coast of India, Bangladesh and Burma — Sri Lanka alone still produces around 80–90% of the world's "true" cinnamon. A related, stronger-tasting bark, cassia, comes from further north: China, India, Madagascar and Ethiopia. Cinnamon has been traded since ancient Egypt, is mentioned repeatedly in Greek and Roman writing, and was valuable enough that the search for a sea route around the Mediterranean's Ottoman-controlled trade lanes was one of the reasons Portugal, the Netherlands and Britain went looking for routes to Asia.
After the rainy season, young shoots are stripped of their bark, which is laid out to dry in the sun and curls into the familiar stick shape as it dries; offcuts and flakes are ground into powder. True cinnamon (Cinnamon verum) bark is noticeably thinner than cassia. In Zanzibar, the leaves go into cooking and tea, and the stems are burned as incense and insect repellent. One practical note: cassia cinnamon contains more coumarin than true cinnamon, which in large amounts can affect blood clotting, liver and kidney function in sensitive people — worth knowing if you're using a lot of it around the holidays.
Vanilla
Vanilla is the world's second most expensive spice after saffron. The vanilla orchid originated in Mexico, where the Totonac people first used it to flavor chocolate, calling it "the fruit of the gods." After the Aztecs conquered the Totonac in the 15th century, they took tribute in vanilla beans, which were later used as a form of currency. The Spanish brought vanilla to Europe as a chocolate additive; by the early 1600s, an apothecary working for Queen Elizabeth I is credited with the idea of using vanilla on its own, without chocolate. The French later added it to ice cream, and in the 1780s Thomas Jefferson — then the American minister to France — brought a vanilla recipe home with him.
For centuries, vanilla could only be grown successfully in Mexico, because its natural pollinator, the Melipona bee, lives nowhere else. That changed in 1841, when Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old enslaved boy on the French island of Réunion, worked out a simple hand-pollination technique using a stick and a flick of the thumb — the method still used on plantations today, which is why vanilla could spread through the tropics at all. The vine itself flowers only once a year, and each flower opens for a single day and must be pollinated within that window or it is lost. Pods take about nine months to mature and then many more months of curing before they reach their familiar dark brown, wrinkled form — a process that can take a year and a half start to finish. Only around 2,000 tons of real vanilla are produced worldwide each year; almost all commercial "vanilla flavor" today is synthetic vanillin, made from petrochemicals, wood pulp, or clove oil — and, in a small and rarely used historical footnote, from a beaver secretion called castoreum.
Tamarind
Tamarind means "Indian date," even though it's the one major spice that originated in Africa and is not a palm fruit. It's now grown throughout the tropics and subtropics for its sour, pod-like fruit, used across countless cuisines. Beyond cooking, it also turns up in traditional medicine and metal polish, and the wood is used in carpentry.
Mace and Nutmeg
Mace and nutmeg come from the same tree, Myristica fragrans: nutmeg is the seed inside the fruit, and mace is the lacy red covering (aril) around it. Both are separated after harvest and dried before use. They originated exclusively on Indonesia's Banda Islands and were a major driver of European exploration and trade from the 15th century on; today they're also grown in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Grenada. Mace has a lighter, more citrus-and-pine character than nutmeg and suits delicate dishes — fish, poultry, light sauces — while nutmeg is the bolder of the two, common in spice blends, marinades and baking.
Cardamom
Cardamom belongs to the ginger family and is native to the forests of southern India and Sri Lanka, though most of the world's supply now comes from Guatemala — an industry founded there before the First World War by a German coffee planter. It ranks as the world's third most expensive spice, after saffron and vanilla, and comes whole in the pod (strongest flavor), as loose seeds, or pre-ground (mildest). It splits broadly into green cardamom (or white, when bleached) and the smokier black cardamom.
Across India, the Middle East, China and Scandinavia, cardamom flavors everything from coffee and baking to savory dishes, and in Ayurvedic medicine it has traditionally been used for digestive complaints and, according to folk use, as an antidote to snake and scorpion venom.
Black Pepper
Pepper is the most widely traded spice on earth, used since ancient Egypt and grown today mainly in India and Vietnam. Breaking Venice's grip on the Mediterranean spice trade was one of the driving reasons behind Portugal's eastward voyages (culminating in Vasco da Gama's sea route to India) and, separately, Spain's westward ones under Christopher Columbus, who was looking for the same spices by sailing the other way. Black, green and white peppercorns are the same fruit at different stages: black is unripe fruit that's cooked briefly then dried, green is unripe fruit dried without cooking, and white is the ripe seed with the outer skin removed. The heat in all of them comes from piperine — a completely different compound from the capsaicin that makes chili peppers hot.
Most of these spices are still on the table at Zatiny, worked into the daily menu rather than kept for a demonstration garden — a fairly direct link between the plants on a spice tour and what ends up on your plate that evening.