Lamu

Lamu is an island town about 350 kilometres north of Mombasa, and its old town is the oldest and best preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001. Visitors fly to Manda airstrip and cross by boat, because no road reaches the island and almost nothing with an engine once you are there. It has been continuously inhabited for over seven hundred years.

Lamu and Lamu Island: One Place, One Page

Travellers use the two names interchangeably and so does everyone who writes about the place, so this guide covers both. Lamu Island is the island. Lamu town is the main settlement on it, at the northern end of the waterfront. Lamu Old Town is the World Heritage property inside that town, a core of 15.6 hectares of buildings rather than the whole island.

The island also holds Shela, a separate village with a separate character, and the archipelago around it holds Manda, Pate and Kiwayu. Those have their own pages here. What follows is Lamu itself.

Lamu Old Town Walking Tours

UNESCO’s assessment is unusually direct about what makes Lamu Old Town different. Swahili settlements were abandoned all along this coast. Lamu was not. It has been lived in for more than seven centuries and it is still being lived in now, which is why the listing is about retained function as much as retained fabric.

The town is coral stone, lime and mangrove poles. Seen from a boat, the seafront presents as a single unified run of arcades and open verandas. Step inside and it becomes a labyrinth: narrow winding streets whose pattern comes from Arab traditions of land distribution, organised into small wards called mitaa, each a cluster of buildings housing closely related families. Interiors carry painted ceilings and wall niches, the large ones called madaka and the small ones zidaka, and Chinese porcelain set into the plasterwork.

The carved doors are the thing everyone photographs, and they are the visible end of something larger. UNESCO’s citation under criterion two is that the architecture and urban structure demonstrate influences arriving over several hundred years from Europe, Arabia and India, worked through Swahili building technique into something distinct. Bantu, Arab, Persian, Indian and European interaction along these seaports is the substance of criterion four.

A guided walk is worth taking on the first morning. The alleys are genuinely confusing, the interesting doorways are not on the obvious routes, and a local guide gets you into courtyards you would otherwise walk past.

Lamu Fort Tours and the Battle That Built It

Lamu Fort sits in the middle of town, a heavy square block among the coral houses, and it is there because of a battle. Around 1812 or 1813, at Shela on the same island, Lamu defeated a larger combined force from Mombasa and Pate. Fearing what would come next, the town asked Oman for protection, and Sultan Said bin Sultan of Muscat sent a governor and a garrison of Baluchi soldiers. Construction of the fort began in 1813 and finished around 1821.

Its later life is the odd part. It served as a prison from 1910 to 1984. The National Museums of Kenya restored it and opened it to the public in 1986, and it now holds the Lamu Fort Library, which serves the county as a research and community library rather than as a museum piece.

The roof is the reason to go up. It gives the only elevated view over the old town roofs and out to Manda.

Riyadha Mosque and the Maulidi Festival

Lamu is more than a preserved town. It is a working centre of Islamic and Swahili scholarship, and UNESCO’s criterion six rests on exactly that: its trading role drew scholars and teachers, which gave it a religious function across East and Central Africa that it still has.

Riyadha Mosque is the institution at the centre of it, founded by Habib Salih, also written Habib Swaleh, who was born in the Comoros in 1852 and died in Lamu in the mid 1930s. The mosque and its college attract students from across the region, and it organises the Maulidi, the festival marking the birth of the Prophet, which has been a fixture of East African Islamic life for well over a century and which UNESCO names explicitly in the inscription.

Maulidi runs on the Islamic lunar calendar, so its date moves through the Gregorian year. It fills the town: processions, recitation, dhow races, donkey races and swimming competitions. The separate Lamu Cultural Festival is the secular counterpart, and it is fixed to a date rather than to the lunar calendar.

If you plan to be in Lamu for either, book a long way out. If you would rather not be in a packed town, check the dates and avoid them, because accommodation is finite on an island.

Lamu Museum Tours and the Five Collections

The National Museums of Kenya runs five sites inside the old town: the Lamu Museum itself, Lamu Fort, the German Post Office, the Swahili House, and the Takwa material with Mwana Arafa Jambeni.

The Lamu Museum, established in the 1960s, holds one of the largest and most authentic Swahili ethnographic collections on the East African coast, gathered from traditional settlements across the archipelago: clothing, jewellery, furniture, manuscripts, amulets, musical instruments, maritime material, archaeological finds and household implements.

The German Post Office is the one that stops people. A German post office operated in Lamu from 22 November 1888 to 3 March 1891, serving the short-lived German protectorate in the sultanate. Two and a bit years, and it left a museum.

The Swahili House is a restored traditional dwelling furnished as it would have been used, which is the fastest way to understand the interiors you have been walking past.

Takwa Ruins Boat Trips to Manda Island

Takwa sits on the south eastern corner of Manda Island, about thirty minutes by boat from Lamu town, and it is the standard half day out. It was a Swahili trading town through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was abandoned in the seventeenth.

The reason for the abandonment is the interesting bit, and it was not war alone. The fresh water turned saline, and that ran alongside continuous fighting between Takwa and Pate. A town on a low coral island lost its wells and that was the end of it. The most distinctive structure is the Friday Mosque, which carries a large pillar on top of the qibla wall, taken to mark the burial of a sheikh below it. The ruins were gazetted as a National Monument in 1982.

The trip is tide dependent, because the creek that reaches Takwa is shallow. Ask when the boat needs to leave rather than when you would like to leave.

Dhow Trips Around the Lamu Archipelago

A dhow trip is how most people get about here and it is also the main thing to do. Sailing dhows run day trips to Manda, to the mangrove channels, out to sandbanks at low tide, and up the coast, usually with fish grilled on board. Sunset sails from the waterfront are the short version.

There is no engine noise on a sailing dhow, which changes the experience completely, and there is also no schedule if the wind drops. Build slack into the day.

Island hopping and mangrove tours have their own pages, as does Swahili cultural experience, which Lamu carries better than anywhere else in the country.

Shela, Manda and Pate: The Neighbouring Islands

Shela is on Lamu Island, roughly forty minutes on foot from the old town or a short boat ride, and it sits beside a long beach that runs north towards Kipungani. It is quieter, more spacious and more expatriate than Lamu town, and it is where most of the beach accommodation is. Travellers routinely describe the choice between the two as a choice between beach and culture. Shela’s dunes are also the island’s fresh water catchment and part of the World Heritage buffer zone, which is why development there is a heritage issue rather than a local planning one.

Manda Island holds the airstrip, Takwa, and a mangrove shoreline that UNESCO names as part of the protected setting of the old town.

Pate Island is further out, larger, much less visited, and was Lamu’s rival and enemy for centuries. It holds Siyu Fort and the old settlements of Pate and Faza. Reaching it takes commitment and a boat that is going that way.

Donkeys and Alleys: The Lamu Town Experience

The absence of cars is not a quirk, it is a constraint the town was built around. The alleys are barely wider than a set of shoulders and there is no route through them for a vehicle, so transport is donkey, boat, foot, and a small number of motorbikes.

Practical consequences, in the order they hit you. Your luggage will be carried, by a handcart or a donkey or a person, and that costs a small amount which is worth having ready. Boats between Manda, Lamu town and Shela leave when they are full rather than at a time. Donkeys have right of way and you step into a doorway to let them past. The old town is shaded almost all day because the streets are so narrow, which is why a hot island is walkable at noon.

The pace is the point and the local phrase for it, pole pole, is not a marketing line. Anything that needs to happen at a specific minute is going to be a struggle here.

Dress and Custom on a Lamu Trip

Lamu is a conservative Muslim town and a close-knit one, and the UNESCO citation describes that social cohesion as part of what is being protected.

Cover shoulders and knees in town. This matters more in the old town and the markets than on the beach at Shela, and it matters more for women than for men, though both should dress down. Swimwear stays at the beach. During Ramadan, eating, drinking and smoking in the street during daylight will be noticed, and most visitors simply do it indoors.

Ask before photographing people, particularly women. Public alcohol is limited and largely confined to licensed hotels. Public displays of affection are out of place. None of this is onerous and none of it is enforced against visitors aggressively; it is simply how a working religious town operates and the courtesy is returned.

Getting to Lamu for a Coast Trip

Flying is how nearly everyone arrives. Scheduled services run from Nairobi Wilson and from Mombasa to Manda airstrip, on Manda Island, and the flight from Nairobi takes well under two hours. From the airstrip it is a short boat crossing to Lamu town or to Shela.

Overland is possible as far as the mainland ferry point, where vehicles stop and you cross by boat. This route runs through a part of the coast where security advice changes, so check current government travel advice for your nationality before committing to it, and check it close to departure rather than months ahead. Most visitors fly for this reason as much as for the time saved.

Once on the island, you are on foot or in a boat. There is no car hire and no reason for one.

Timing a Lamu Trip

Lamu Questions

Lamu anchors the far north of the coast, alongside Shela, Manda Island, Pate Island and Kiwayu Island. Further south the coast runs down through Malindi, Watamu and Mombasa. For the coast as a whole, start at Kenya Coast.