Located just a few miles off the African mainland, Zanzibar was coveted by major powers as the gateway to African wealth. The cultural imprints left by colonizers have unfolded throughout history, overlapping and blending but not excluding one another. Zanzibar is a land of merchants and commodities, such as spices that once cost more than their weight in gold or the now-extinct ivory trade. It is also sadly known as the last port in the brutal slave trade that departed for Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Above all, Zanzibar is a nature-blessed island with a turquoise sea teeming with life, beaches of sand so white it resembles snow, and an interior covered in intense greenery.