Dar es Salaam
Tanzania's largest city and Indian Ocean port
Dar es Salaam is Tanzania's commercial heart and one of the great ports of the East African coast, a humid, fast-growing metropolis of more than eight million sprawling along a sheltered Indian Ocean harbor. Its name, from Arabic, means abode of peace, a legacy of the Swahili and Omani world that shaped this coastline for centuries. Though the official capital moved inland to Dodoma decades ago, Dar — as everyone calls it — remains the country's economic engine, its busiest gateway and the largest city, a place of dhows and container cranes, markets and rising towers.
The city wraps around a natural inlet that forms one of the finest harbors on the Swahili coast, the land low and flat where mangrove creeks meet the warm ocean. The climate is tropical and sticky, with two rainy seasons driven by the monsoon winds that long carried trading dhows between Africa, Arabia and India. North and south of the center, palm-lined beaches and offshore reefs draw visitors, while the harbor itself handles the bulk of Tanzania's seaborne trade and serves as the maritime outlet for landlocked neighbors deep in the African interior.
Sultan Majid bin Said of Zanzibar founded the town in the 1860s near the older village of Mzizima, and it grew under German and then British colonial rule into the principal city of what became Tanganyika and later Tanzania. In 1973 the government decided to shift the capital inland to Dodoma, a transfer only recently completed, yet Dar es Salaam kept the diplomats, the business and the crowds. Today it anchors a Swahili-speaking coastal culture and a national economy whose growth has made it one of the fastest-expanding cities on the continent.