Portuguese Chapel

A short walk from the Malindi seafront stands a small whitewashed chapel in a walled plot with a graveyard beside it. The National Museums of Kenya describes it as the oldest Christian church in East Africa. It takes ten minutes to see, and the graveyard is the reason to go.

What It Is

The Portuguese presence in Malindi began with Vasco da Gama’s arrival in 1498. According to the National Museums account, it was on his second voyage to India that he left a group of soldiers in the town, along with a chapel built in the style of the navigator’s chapel at Sagres in Portugal and a trading base with store houses, barracks, residences and offices.

The chapel lasted almost a century, until the Portuguese withdrew to Mombasa in 1593. The community it served may have numbered around sixty Christians.

The National Museums of Kenya gives two datings in its own material for the same building: the body of its account attributes the chapel to da Gama’s second voyage, which sailed in 1502, while the page’s own closing line dates it to the 1490s. Nothing here picks between them, and neither should anything else. The uncontested part is that the chapel belongs to the first years of the Portuguese presence in Malindi and was standing well before the withdrawal to Mombasa in 1593.

Why the Building Is So Small

Both chapel and graveyard are modest for a community of that size, and the National Museums suggests the modesty may have been deliberate. Malindi was then an established Muslim town with seventeen mosques, itself a measure of how substantial the place was. Set against the Vasco da Gama Pillar, removed once for causing offence before being permitted at a different site, the chapel completes a picture of a Swahili port that accommodated a foreign faith on its own terms and at its own scale.

The Graveyard

Four and a half centuries of arrivals lie in one small plot.

• 1542. Francis Xavier, later canonised, landed at Malindi while travelling to Goa and buried a seaman in this graveyard. Catholics in Malindi still hold Mass at the chapel at Easter and on the first Sunday of December for the St Francis Xavier family day.
• 1894. J. Bell Smith, the first resident administrator for the Imperial British East Africa Company, which held Malindi between 1890 and 1895, was buried here. He had overseen construction of the building that is now part of Malindi Museum.
• Until 1958. Burials continued occasionally after that, and then stopped.

Between the Portuguese departure in 1593 and Bell Smith’s burial three hundred years later, the chapel has almost no recorded history. Malindi declined through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the point of being described as ruined and deserted, and the chapel may well have been a ruin at times within that gap.

Visiting the Chapel

The chapel was gazetted as a monument in 1935, the same year as the pillar, and is managed by the National Museums of Kenya as part of the Malindi Museum group. In 1993 the Kenyan branch of the Society of Jesus funded the Malindi Museum Society to help restore chapel and graveyard, and the Kenya Horticultural Society later restored the garden.

Admission is set by the National Museums of Kenya under the admissions fees regulations effective May 2026, which price Malindi as a single entry and do not list the chapel separately from the museum station that runs it. Ask at Malindi Museum how the four sites are ticketed. Ticketing is eCitizen only across National Museums sites, with no cash taken. The notice gives 08:30 to 17:30, Monday to Sunday, as a general rule, but site pages elsewhere in the estate depart from it, so confirm locally. Ten to fifteen minutes covers the visit.

Do not make a separate trip for it. The chapel works as one stop in a walking circuit of the museum, the pillar and the old town, which together take a comfortable half day and make far more sense in sequence than any of them does alone. The heritage tours guide sets that circuit in its wider coastal context.

Questions Travellers Ask About the Portuguese Chapel