The Stone Town of Zanz­ibar is a fine exam­ple of the Swahili coastal trad­ing towns of East Africa. It retains its urban fab­ric and town­scape vir­tu­al­ly intact and con­tains many fine build­ings that reflect its par­tic­u­lar cul­ture, which has brought togeth­er and homog­e­nized dis­parate ele­ments of the cul­tures of Africa, the Arab region, India, and Europe over more than a mil­len­ni­um.