Nairobi
Kenya's capital and East Africa's commercial hub
Nairobi is the rare capital with lions and rhinos grazing in sight of its skyline. East Africa's commercial heart and the most influential city in the region, it grew from a colonial railway depot into a metropolis of more than five million in little more than a century. Glass towers of banks, regional headquarters and tech startups rise above leafy older suburbs, while on the city's southern edge Nairobi National Park preserves a wedge of open savanna where wildlife roams against a backdrop of high-rises — an improbable juxtaposition found nowhere else on the continent.
The city sits on a high plateau around 1,795 meters above sea level, a setting that gives it a mild, temperate climate despite lying almost exactly on the equator. Cool nights and a long history of jacaranda-lined avenues earned it the old nickname the Green City in the Sun. Streams feeding the Athi River drain the area, and the land tilts from the cooler, wetter highlands in the west toward the drier Athi-Kapiti plains in the southeast, where the national park gives way to the broader savanna of the Rift Valley region.
Nairobi began in 1899 as a supply and rail depot on the Uganda Railway, chosen for its water and elevation, and quickly displaced Mombasa as the colonial capital. After independence it became the seat of the Kenyan government and a hub for the United Nations, which sites one of its few global headquarters here. The city is the gateway to Kenya's safari tourism and the financial and media center of East Africa, even as rapid growth has produced both gleaming new districts and the vast informal settlement of Kibera, one of the largest in Africa.