City Break Zimbabwe

Wide, jacaranda-lined avenues. Low-rise suburbs in deep green. A city built at 1,480 metres where the sky sits a little higher and the air a little cooler than anywhere else in southern Africa. Harare moves at a pace that surprises most visitors — not slow, not frantic, but purposeful in a way that feels entirely its own. The café on Second Street is full. The National Gallery is quietly extraordinary. The craft market at Harare Gardens has the most honest stone carving prices you will find anywhere on the continent.

Two hundred kilometres to the southwest, Bulawayo carries a different weight. Zimbabwe's second city is older, quieter, architecturally more intact — wide streets designed for ox-wagons to turn in, colonial-era buildings that still function, a natural history museum that ranks among the finest in Africa. The population is predominantly Ndebele-speaking; the culture, the music, and the food have their own character. A day in Bulawayo after Harare shows you how much variety exists within a single country's borders.

The practical case for spending time in Zimbabwe's cities: Harare is the entry and exit point for most international flights (Robert Mugabe International Airport), so a day or two in the capital at the start or end of a trip costs nothing extra in travel time. The visual arts scene, the food, the wildlife sanctuaries within 20 minutes of the city centre, and the ease of getting around make Harare more interesting per square kilometre than most visitors expect. Budget: accommodation from $40 for quality guesthouses, $80 to $180 for mid-range lodges, $200+ for boutique hotels in the northern suburbs. Restaurants: $10 to $30 mains. All in USD.

Harare — the capital city that surprises

Harare was designed as a garden city: each suburb set back from wide roads lined with indigenous trees, flowering bougainvillea, and the purple blaze of jacarandas that bloom every November. The city centre is compact and walkable — the Parliament, Africa Unity Square, the National Gallery, and the Meikles Hotel all within a few blocks of each other.

The Kopje, a granite outcrop that rises above the CBD, was the original lookout point of the colonial city. From its summit, the full grid of the centre and the spread of the northern suburbs is visible in a single view — useful for orientation on the first morning. National Heroes' Acre, seven kilometres west of the centre on the Bulawayo Road, is the national monument to independence: 57 acres on a hillside overlooking the city, with a bold North Korean-influenced design and graves of Zimbabwe's liberation war heroes.

The northern suburbs — Borrowdale, Highlands, Avondale — are where most restaurants, cafés, and hotels are concentrated. Borrowdale Racecourse has afternoon and Saturday racing from May to October, one of the more relaxed and characterful social scenes in the city. Avondale Shopping Centre has good bookshops, a craft market on Sunday mornings, and several of Harare's best cafés.

Mbare, the oldest suburb of the city — established in 1907 as a workers' housing district — is the densest, most energetic neighbourhood in Harare. The Mbare Musika bus terminus and market covers several city blocks and is one of the most productive urban markets in southern Africa: fresh produce, hardware, clothing, second-hand electronics, traditional medicine, and everything else. Go with a guide; do not go alone on a first visit.

The Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) runs for five days every April at the Harare Gardens amphitheatre: 500+ performances across theatre, dance, music, and visual art, drawing performers from across Africa and beyond. If your city break coincides with April, HIFA should be the defining event of the stay.

Wildlife within the city — sanctuaries and woodlands

Two of Zimbabwe's best wildlife experiences are a 20-minute drive from Harare city centre — an unusual combination that makes the capital genuinely distinctive for urban tourism.

Wild Is Life, off Airport Road, is a rescue and rehabilitation sanctuary for orphaned animals: elephants, pangolin, giraffe, predators, and plains game, set in private grounds where visitor numbers are strictly limited. Morning tours run Tuesday to Saturday from 10:00 to 12:30; afternoon tours run daily from 15:30. Booking is essential and must be made in advance through the website. Entry $80 per adult (morning), $110 including high tea and prosecco (afternoon). The elephant interaction — watching the care team work with animals they know by name and history — is unlike any managed wildlife experience elsewhere in Zimbabwe.

Mukuvisi Woodlands, 265 hectares of miombo and msasa woodland on the eastern edge of the city, has giraffe, zebra, eland, wildebeest, impala, and over 300 bird species — walkable from a car park, with a small café and a horse riding concession. Entry $6.0 per adult. It is the closest thing Harare has to a free-roaming inner-city game park, and on a weekday morning you often have the trails entirely to yourself.

Kuimba Shiri Bird Sanctuary at Lake Chivero, 30 km from the city, adds a third option for nature within easy range: a 265-species bird list, boat trips on the lake, and a restaurant with outdoor tables overlooking the water. Lake Chivero Recreational Park surrounding the reservoir has rhino, buffalo, and hippo for those extending the day.

Thetford Game Reserve, 45 minutes from the city on the Mazowe Road, is a private reserve with Big Five and guided game drives bookable for half-day trips from Harare — useful for travellers who want a game drive experience without committing to the full Hwange or Mana Pools itinerary.

Bulawayo — Zimbabwe's second city

Bulawayo was founded in 1894 on the site of King Lobengula's royal kraal, burned by British forces before he retreated to the Matopo Hills where he died in 1894. The city that replaced it was planned with Cecil Rhodes' characteristic scale: roads wide enough for an ox-wagon to turn a full circle, which is why Bulawayo's avenues today are among the widest in the southern hemisphere.

The city centre retains more intact colonial-era architecture than almost any other city in the region. The Bulawayo Club, the Town Hall, the Natural History Museum building, the railway station — all built between 1895 and 1920, largely unchanged and still functioning. Walking the CBD takes two hours and amounts to an open-air museum of late-Victorian and Edwardian African architecture.

The Natural History Museum in Centenary Park is the primary reason most visitors stop in Bulawayo. Nine galleries covering geology, palaeontology, zoology, ornithology, and archaeology — including the second-largest mounted African elephant in the world, a coelacanth specimen, and a Hall of Man that traces Zimbabwean history from early humanity to the post-independence era. Entry $10 for international visitors, open daily 09:00–17:00.

The railway museum beside the main station has a dozen working-condition locomotives on display, including the original engine that pulled the first train into Bulawayo in 1897. If you have any interest in the history of rail in southern Africa, this is one of the most complete collections in the continent.

Bulawayo is the gateway to Matobo Hills (45 minutes south), covered in depth on the Adventure and Romantic pages. A combined Bulawayo day — Natural History Museum in the morning, city walk, then Matobo Hills in the afternoon — is the standard and highly effective itinerary.

Art, craft and urban culture

Zimbabwe's art scenes in both cities are substantially more interesting than their international profile suggests. Harare has three world-class sculpture venues alone; the contemporary painting and textile scenes add depth that takes several days to explore properly.

Chapungu Sculpture Park in Msasa, Harare, has been promoting Shona stone sculpture since 1970. Twenty acres of landscaped garden with the most important permanent collection of Zimbabwean stone sculpture in existence. Founder Roy Guthrie drove the international exhibitions that first brought this work to European and American collections. Guided tours by resident sculptors, with mbira music and refreshments, available on request.

The Book Café in Harare's Fife Avenue was for years the centre of the city's artistic and intellectual life — poetry readings, live music, theatre, jazz — until it closed and reopened in various forms. Its current incarnation and legacy spaces continue to host live events that give access to Harare's creative community in an informal setting.

Harare's Borrowdale area has a concentration of commercial galleries: Gallery Delta (one of the oldest in the country), First Floor Gallery, Dzimbahwe Gallery, and the specialist dealers around Avondale and Sam Levy's Village. Contemporary Zimbabwean painting, photography, and printmaking at quality levels that would be exhibited in London or New York — priced accordingly, but substantially less than the equivalent works would command in those markets.

Craft shopping: the main outdoor craft market at Harare Gardens has the best variety of authentic Shona carvings, Ndebele bead work, Zimbabwe batik, and ceramic work in one place. Prices are negotiable; quality is variable; know what you are looking at before committing to a large purchase. The Avondale flea market on Sunday mornings is more curated and slightly more expensive but more reliably quality-controlled.

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