Carved foliage fills the arched lintel above a wooden door in Stone Town, Zanzibar.
Heritage

African Heritage Sites, Country by Country

99 heritage guides across 20 African countries, with what UNESCO World Heritage inscription means and what it does not tell a visitor.
  • Category Heritage
  • Reviewed 18 September 2026
  • Sources 1
  • Length 3 min read

This is the index to every heritage guide on the site: 99 places across 20 countries, each with its own page covering what is there, what it is for, how to visit it and what the visit asks of you.

Some of these are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List and some are not. Each guide says which, because the answer changes what you will find when you arrive, and because it is a fact about administration rather than about worth.

What UNESCO inscription means, and what it does not

The World Heritage Convention is a treaty. A property is inscribed when a state party nominates it and the World Heritage Committee accepts that it meets at least one of the selection criteria, and inscription brings obligations: a management plan, monitoring, and reporting on the property's condition. UNESCO states the principle plainly, that World Heritage sites belong to all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the territory on which they are located.

What inscription does not do is rank places by how much they are worth seeing. A site is not inscribed because it is beautiful or important in the ordinary sense. It is inscribed because a government put the nomination together and the committee agreed. Places of real significance sit outside the List for reasons that have nothing to do with them: a nomination is expensive, it is political, and it requires a state with the capacity and the will to make it.

So the index below is not a UNESCO list and does not present itself as one. It is this publication's heritage coverage, and inscription status belongs on each individual page where it can be stated precisely.

Reading a heritage guide before you go

Every guide here covers the same ground in the same order, so the pages can be compared: what the place is, what happened there, how to reach it, what it costs in time, and what conduct is expected. The last of those is the one most often skipped and the one most likely to matter.

Several of these sites are places of mourning. Some restrict photography, some ask for particular dress, and at some the restriction is not posted anywhere and is simply understood. Where this publication knows the expectation, the guide says so.

Heritage guides by country

Grouped by country, alphabetically within each.

Botswana

Cape Verde

Egypt

Ethiopia

Ghana

Kenya

Madagascar

Malawi

Mauritius

Morocco

Namibia

Nigeria

Rwanda

Senegal

Seychelles

South Africa

Tanzania

Tunisia

Uganda

Zambia

Sources

  1. UNESCO: World Heritage

Background on the World Heritage Convention. Each guide carries its own sources for the site it covers.