Not to miss while in Zanzibar is the spice tour that introduces visitors to the spices that made the island famous worldwide. Zanzibar was particularly know for the production of cloves.
In fact, in the eighteen hundreds, Sultan Said Seyyid started planting this tree as an additional source of income for his flourishing empire.
In a few decades Zanzibar became the world’s largest produces of cloves, mainly due to the abundance of slave labour for the cultivation and harvesting of the plantations.
Zanzibar Island had the most extensive plantations until 1872 when a series of violent storms destroyed most of the crop, leaving Pemba Island as the heard of the clove industry.
Because cloves had been such a success, later sultans introduced other species that included ginger, cumin, cinnamon, black pepper and lemon grass.
