Park · Masvingo, Zimbabwe
Great Zimbabwe
The stone city that gave Zimbabwe its name, 27 km from Masvingo: dry-stone walls, the Conical Tower and the soapstone birds, a World Heritage Site since 1986.
Short answer
At Great Zimbabwe, international visitors pay US$15 (about €13.50 or £11) per adult and US$8 per child per visit. The rates apply from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2026.
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- Entry fee, international adult
- US$15 €13
- Malaria
- Masvingo sits at 1,075 m, under the 1,200 m line in the UK travel health advice.
- Places to stay
- 5
- Park fee nearby: Lake Mutirikwi Recreational Park
- US$5 €4about 12 km away
Great Zimbabwe fees 2026
Checked National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe tariffValid 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2026, per person per visit, in US dollars.
| Who | Adult | Child |
|---|---|---|
| International visitorsUS, Europe and everyone else | US$15 €13 | US$8 €7 |
| Zimbabwean residents | US$5 | US$3 |
- NMMZ sells its tickets as Local or Non-Resident, nothing in between. There is no SADC rate at Great Zimbabwe, so a visitor from South Africa, Zambia or Botswana pays the US$15 non-resident fee like anyone else from abroad. The resident row is for people living in Zimbabwe.
- Children under five go in free as long as an adult is with them. NMMZ does not publish the age at which the child rate stops, so ask at the gate if you have a teenager with you.
- The ticket covers the site museum. NMMZ's ticket shop also lists the Great Zimbabwe Site Museum as its own line at exactly the same prices, which I read as the same ticket sold under a second name rather than a second charge. If you are asked to pay twice, query it.
- NMMZ prices its tickets in US dollars, so bring US$ cash in small notes.
- NMMZ's Visit page says its museums and monuments open 8 am to 4:30 pm every day. Great Zimbabwe Guide says the ruins usually open at 8 am and close at 5 pm. Either way, arrive early: the guide warns off the 11 am to 2 pm heat.
- A government guide can be hired at the gate when you pay, and is not part of the fee shown here.
- The monument prices in NMMZ's ticket shop in October 2026 match what Great Zimbabwe Guide printed in March 2024.
- NMMZ gives no start or end date for these fees. I show them as valid to 31 December 2026 and will re-check them then.
- Fees are set by National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe. Official tariff · Seen a new rate? Tell us
€1 = US$1.12 · £1 = US$1.34 (ECB rate, 3 Nov 2026). Converted amounts are approximate; you pay in US dollars.
How we got these figures
- The figures come from NMMZ's own online ticket shop. It sells one product, Monument and Site Entrance Fee, with a price for every combination of site, age group and Local or Non-Resident. The page itself only shows the US$0 to US$15 range; the per-ticket prices sit in the shop's public product data, which I read for the Great Zimbabwe lines through the shop's public product API. The product was last edited on 11 May 2026.
- Great Zimbabwe Guide (an independent Zimbabwe travel blog) gives the same four figures, last checked March 2024. That is the second source for each row.
- The validFrom date is the start of this calendar year, not a date NMMZ gives. The same prices were in print in March 2024 and in NMMZ's shop in 2026, so they have held at least that long.
- NMMZ online ticket shop, Monument and Site Entrance Fee (per-ticket prices in the shop's product data; page last edited 11 May 2026) · official · checked 18 Oct 2026
- NMMZ, Visit page (opening hours and the US$0 to US$15 fee range) · official · checked 18 Oct 2026
- NMMZ, Regional Museums (children under five free, reduced rates for school parties) · official · checked 18 Oct 2026
- Great Zimbabwe Guide, Great Zimbabwe Monument and Ruins travel guide (prices last checked March 2024, page updated November 2025) · one source · checked 18 Oct 2026
Great Zimbabwe is the stone city that gave the country its name in 1980, 27 km south-east of Masvingo. Its dry-stone walls, no mortar anywhere, went up between the 11th and 15th centuries and the city was abandoned in the 16th or 17th century. It is the largest of more than 300 sites of its kind in southern Africa and a World Heritage Site since 1986. A fast walker is round in a couple of hours. Take longer.
Getting there
Everything comes through Masvingo, 292 km south of Harare on the A4, the Beitbridge road. Turn left off the A4 in town at the signs; the last stretch is dirt that most cars manage. Reckon on about four hours from Harare or Bulawayo and eight from Victoria Falls. Combis from Masvingo take about 20 minutes, go only once full, and drop you 2 km short of the gate. Our self-drive guide covers roadblocks and tolls.
When to go
April to September is dry. One long-running guide to the site picks May, when the aloes flower and the heat is off. June and July nights around Masvingo drop to frost. September and October are the hottest months and the rains run from November to March. Be at the gate around 9 am and off the hill between 11 am and 2 pm.
What to do
Three areas. The Hill Complex sits 80 m above the plain, visible 10 km out; it is the oldest part and its Eastern Enclosure is where six of the eight soapstone Zimbabwe Birds were found. The path up is single file and steep in places, so do it first. The Great Enclosure is a 250 m girdle wall 10 or 11 m high depending on who measured it, with the Conical Tower between its two walls. The Valley Ruins have been heavily plundered over the years.
Guides are hired at the information office by the gate; two independent guides to the site warn that what they know can be thin, so find a private guide if the history matters. Allow about four hours, and leave time for the museum, where the birds, gold beads and iron tools dug from the site are kept. One bird was cut off its pedestal in 1889 and sold to Cecil Rhodes; Wikipedia records the last of them coming home from South Africa in April 2026. Lake Mutirikwi is close by.
Good to know
- Masvingo is at 1,075 m, under the 1,200 m line where TravelHealthPro rates malaria high risk from November to June.
- Fresh water carries bilharzia. Swim in the pool, not the lake.
- No ATM on site. Bring US dollar cash in small notes.
- Toilets are at the gate and the museum, none inside the ruins.
- The campsite is next to the main gate. Do not feed the monkeys and baboons.
- Power cuts are long and frequent. Do not drive outside town at night.
History and culture
Great Zimbabwe is the stone city the country took its name from, 27 km south-east of Masvingo (Fort Victoria). From the thirteenth century it was the capital of a Shona state that sent gold and ivory to the Indian Ocean coast, and its granite walls, laid without mortar, are the largest ancient structures in Africa south of the Sahara. For much of the twentieth century white Rhodesia insisted that Africans could not have built it, so a visit here is also a lesson in who gets to own a country's past.
- 4th to 7th century
Farmers of the Gokomere tradition worked iron and grew crops in the valley below the hill from the 4th century, and built nothing in stone. San hunter-gatherers had lived in this country long before them, by some reckonings for 100,000 years. source
- 11th to 14th century
Stone walling began on the hill in the 11th century and went on for more than 300 years; the Great Enclosure in the valley went up in the 13th and 14th centuries. As Mapungubwe faded around 1300, Great Zimbabwe took over the gold and ivory trade to Sofala on the coast. The digs produced Chinese Longquan celadon and blue and white porcelain of the 14th and 15th centuries, Persian ware, glass beads and Arabian coins, and the court kept a large cattle herd that it moved with the seasons. The state it ruled may have covered 50,000 square kilometres. source
- About 1450 to the 1600s
International trade dropped off from the early 1400s. Shona tradition says a member of the royal family, Nyatsimba Mutota, led people north in search of salt around 1450 and founded the Mutapa state there, and that the king had tired of salt made from goat dung. Angoche traders then opened a Zambezi route to the western goldfields, which fed the rise of [Khami](/zimbabwe/khami-ruins/) as capital of the Butua kingdom. By the 16th century Mutapa and Butua were the powers in the region, and Great Zimbabwe was probably lived in until some time in the 17th century before it was abandoned. source
- 1506 to 1538
The first written records are Portuguese and second-hand. Diogo de Alcáçova described the buildings in a letter of 1506, Vicente Pegado recorded the name Symbaoe, meaning a court, in 1531, and in 1538 João de Barros passed on the opinion of people in the region that work on that scale must be the devil's. source
- 1867 to 1871
Adam Render, a German-born hunter who had deserted his wife and four children in Zoutpansberg in 1868 to live north of the Limpopo with a chief's daughter, came across the ruins on a hunting trip in 1867 and told almost no one. He lived about 20 km south-east of the site, and in 1871 he put up the German explorer Karl Mauch for nine months while Mauch walked the walls. Mauch took the credit, and Render died in obscurity in 1881. source
- 1889 to 1906
Looting followed. Willi Posselt cut a soapstone bird from its pedestal in 1889 and sold it to Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes backed J Theodore Bent's dig of 1891, which cut into the Conical Tower and wrecked its layers, W G Neal's Ancient Ruins Company stripped the site of anything it could sell, and Richard Hall's diggings did more damage still. David Randall-MacIver's excavation of 1905 to 1906 was the first scientific one and said plainly that the city was medieval and built by the ancestors of the Shona. source
- 1929 to 1970
Gertrude Caton Thompson's team spent twelve days here in mid-1929 and confirmed an African origin. It made no difference to official Rhodesia, which through the 1960s and 1970s held to the line that the builders were not black. The archaeologist Paul Sinclair was told not to mention radiocarbon dates, and Peter Garlake, the Senior Inspector of Monuments, and Roger Summers of the National Museum both left the country. Since the 1950s no serious archaeologist has doubted that Shona-speaking Africans built Great Zimbabwe. source
- 1980 to 2026
At independence in 1980 the new country named itself after the ruins and kept the bird on its flag. In 1981 South Africa sent back four of the birds it held, in exchange for a collection of insects kept in Harare (Salisbury), and by 2003 Berlin's museum had returned the lower part of another bird. The last bird, the one Posselt sold to Rhodes, stayed at Groote Schuur in Cape Town until April 2026, when South Africa handed it over together with ancestral human remains. source
- Languages and people
- The people around the monument are Karanga, the south-central of the six Shona dialect clusters, and Karanga was once a name outsiders used for all the Shona. Shona speakers make up at least 70 per cent of Zimbabwe, and the Ndebele are the largest minority at about 20 per cent. Clans are known by a mutupo, an emblem that is usually an animal, and the system has long been used to keep marriages clear of incest. source
- God, ancestors and the hill
- Shona religion centres on Mwari, the creator, who was never addressed directly but through spirit mediums possessed by ancestral spirits, most famously at the Matonjeni shrines in the Matopo Hills. Mwari's worship is thought to have been taken into the religion of Great Zimbabwe. source
- The village by the Great Enclosure
- The thatched village near the Great Enclosure and the curio shop is a reconstruction, not part of the ruins, and the Great Zimbabwe Guide says so plainly. In it you can watch traditional dancing and, for a separate charge, consult a n'anga (a traditional healer). source
- Stone and the mbira
- Shona stone sculpture developed in the eleventh century, the same century the walls were begun, and peaked in the thirteenth and fourteenth. It re-emerged in the 1940s, and from the 1950s Zimbabwean artists carved for European collectors. The other sound of the place is the mbira, the thumb piano; the 22 to 24 key mbira dzavadzimu is played to call the ancestral spirits, and the smaller 15 key nyunga nyunga is taught from primary school up. source
For German visitors: Karl Mauch from Stetten im Remstal in Württemberg, born 7 May 1837, was the first European to describe the ruins, in 1871, and decided they were the biblical Ophir because he did not believe the people living around them could have built them. He died in Stuttgart on 4 April 1875 after a fall from a third-floor hotel window; nobody knows whether it was an accident. source
For German visitors: Willie Posselt, whose gravestone says he rediscovered the ruins in August 1889, and his brother Harry were sons of the German missionary Karl Wilhelm Posselt and grew up in Natal speaking Zulu. They read Mauch's account, lost their oxen to tsetse fly on a first attempt in 1887, and reached the site in 1888 and 1889 to find Shona families living inside the Hill Complex and four carved birds standing in a cattle kraal, facing east. source
For German visitors: The lower part of one bird ended up in Berlin's Museum für Völkerkunde. The museum's collections were scattered in the Second World War, some taken by the Russian army as spoils, and only around German reunification did Berlin learn that the fragment had survived. In February 2000 the German ambassador quietly handed it to National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe on permanent loan, with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation keeping legal title, and on 6 May 2004 the two halves were put back together at the site museum, where they stand today. source
For German visitors: Carl Peters, the German colonial adventurer, collected a ceramic ushabti (an Egyptian funerary figure) in 1905. Flinders Petrie tied it to the pharaoh Thutmose III; the Egyptologist Schäfer called it a forgery. It was one more attempt to give the ruins to anyone but Africans. source
For American visitors: Adam Render, the first European to see the ruins, was born in Germany in 1822 but raised in the United States, where he lived until about 1842 before moving to Natal and joining the Voortrekkers (the Boer families who left the Cape for the interior). He is said to have fought the British at Boomplaats in 1848. source
For American visitors: American readers followed the argument over the builders from the start. The New York Times ran Vast Ruins in South Africa on 18 December 1892, Solomon's Mines on 14 April 1906, and on 20 October 1929 the headline Ascribes Zimbabwe to African Bantus after Caton Thompson's excavation. source
Main sights in Great Zimbabwe
7- Hill Complex (Hill Ruins)
The oldest part of the city, on the granite hill above the valley, lived in from the 11th to the 13th century before power moved down to the Great Enclosure. The Eastern Enclosure is where the birds most likely stood: slots in a platform show where their monoliths were set, a high balcony looks down on it, and a granite boulder nearby has the shape of a bird. Climb it first, before the heat.
Wikipedia, Great Zimbabwe - Great Enclosure and Conical Tower
An oval of granite blocks with a girdle wall 250 m round, 6 m thick at its thickest and 10 m at its highest, the biggest stone structure in Southern Africa. Inside it stands the Conical Tower, about 10 m high and 5 m across at the base.
National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, Southern Region Masvingo - Valley Ruins
The smaller enclosures between the hill and the Great Enclosure carry the names of white men from the first colonial years, not of anyone who built them: R N Hall's survey of 1905 lists Posselt, Philips, Maund, Renders and Mauch Ruins. Ridge Ruins sit on a bare granite ridge where Sir John Willoughby camped and dug in November and December 1892, and No. 1 Ruins, just west of the Great Enclosure, had walls crowned with aloes and euphorbias when Hall wrote about them.
R N Hall, Great Zimbabwe, Mashonaland, Rhodesia (Methuen, 1905), Project Gutenberg - Great Zimbabwe site museum
The site museum holds the soapstone birds, gold beads, glass trade beads, iron tools, ceremonial spears, cattle bones, pottery and the zoomorphic pot found on site. NMMZ says six of the eight birds came from the Eastern Enclosure on the hill, one from the balcony facing the Western Enclosure and the finest from the valley.
National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, Southern Region Masvingo - Traditional village
NMMZ's traditional village shows how descendants of the builders live now, with sculptors, basket makers and traditional religious practice. Treat it as a craft and performance stop, not archaeology.
National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, Southern Region Masvingo - Lake Mutirikwi and Kyle Recreational Park
The dam lake beside the monument, with a [recreational park](/zimbabwe/lake-mutirikwi-recreational-park/) where you can track rhino, see the dam wall and go out in a boat or fish. Most of the hotels visitors use are closer to the monument and the lake than to Masvingo town.
Great Zimbabwe Guide, Great Zimbabwe Monument and Ruins travel guide - Fort Victoria's towers in Masvingo
What remains of the fort the British South Africa Company built in 1892: the Bell Tower in the centre of [Masvingo](/zimbabwe/masvingo/) and the Curfew Tower of 1893, a national monument since 1938 that now keeps guns used in the First Chimurenga war. Masvingo is 27 km from the ruins, and the towers are the other half of their story.
National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, Southern Region Masvingo
Did you know?
- Nobody agrees on what the name means. The usual reading is dzimba dze mabwe, Shona for large houses of stone, but Peter Garlake argued for dzimba hwe, venerated houses, in the Zezuru dialect. The Portuguese wrote it down as Symbaoe, a court, in 1531. source
- The population of the city is shrinking in the literature. For decades 18,000 to 20,000 people was accepted without question; a 2017 study led by Shadreck Chirikure counted huts by period, allowed four to seven people to a hut or homestead, and concluded that it is unlikely ever to have held more than 10,000 people. source
- The birds, probably bateleur eagles (chapungu in Shona, the messenger from Mwari and the ancestors), are about 40 cm tall and stood on columns more than 90 cm high. Rhodes mounted his in the library at Groote Schuur, had wooden copies made for the staircase, and put stone replicas three times life size on the gates of his house near Cambridge. source
- Harry Posselt, Willie's brother, chose a pioneer land grant that enclosed Great Zimbabwe, most likely to dig it for treasure. The site was declared a monument before he could, and the brothers were given farms at Felixburg instead. source
- The birds South Africa gave back arrived at New Sarum (now Manyame) air base on 29 January 1981 in two Dakota aircraft of the Air Force of Zimbabwe. The price was a scientific collection of Hymenoptera, the order of bees, wasps and ants, which went south in exchange. source
- Zimbabwe became a country's name in 1960, when the nationalist Michael Mawema coined it; his Zimbabwe National Party was the first to use it officially in 1961. The ruins became the name twenty years before the name became the state. source
Checked 19 October 2026.
Wildlife you might see
8- likelyBaboons and monkeysAt the monument itself. NMMZ says the monkeys and baboons have become part of the attraction, and asks visitors not to feed them. All yearsource
- likelyHerons, egrets, storks and ducksOn Lake Mutirikwi itself, with other waterbirdssource
- likelyWhite rhinoNot at the ruins. In the Mutirikwi park close to the lake, on a rhino walk. Expert Africa says visitors on the walks see them regularly. All yearsource
- possibleForest birds: Narina trogon, African emerald cuckoo, silvery-cheeked hornbill, red-capped robin-chat, Cape batis and swee waxbillThe forest at the ruins. BirdLife Zimbabwe lists all of these as recorded there, with scaly-throated honeyguide, grey cuckooshrike and African dusky flycatcher. All year. BirdLife gives no seasons for the sitesource
- possibleMiombo woodland birds: miombo rock-thrush, boulder chat, Stierling's wren-warbler, miombo double-collared sunbirdThe miombo woodland around Lake Mutirikwi. BirdLife notes that, this close to the edge of the plateau, some lowveld birds turn up as wellsource
- possibleGiraffe and zebraLake Mutirikwi Recreational Park. Expert Africa's visitor record shows both, but it rests on a single reportsource
- possibleNile crocodile and hippoAlong the shore of Lake Mutirikwi. ZimParks lists both as a caution for the park, not as a sight to go looking forsource
- rareBuffalo and leopardLake Mutirikwi Recreational Park. ZimParks names both among the park's more than 25 mammal speciessource
Likelihood is for a normal visit of two or three days, from the sources linked. Nothing is guaranteed in the wild.
Hikes and walks
3- The full circuit: museum, Hill Complex, Valley Ruins and Great Enclosure
The suggested self-guided route goes from the gate to the museum (no photographs inside), up the Hill Complex, down past the café and curio shop, across the Valley Complex and into the Great Enclosure by its north entrance, finishing at the Conical Tower. The lower part of the site is mostly flat but the paths are sandy, unpaved and bumpy, and the hill takes more fitness. The site covers over 7 km².
Permit: The NMMZ entry ticket. A government guide can be hired at the gate when you pay
Great Zimbabwe Guide, walking around Great Zimbabwe Monument (route map, updated March 2024) - Hill Complex by the Modern Path
The longer way up the hill, with a gentle slope, and the easier choice if steep climbs are not your thing. On a clear day Lake Mutirikwi shows from the top.
Permit: Included in the entry ticket
Becoming the Muse, Of Great Zimbabwe (June 2022) - Hill Complex by the Ancient (Traditional) Ascent
The older path up the hill, about 460 m long according to one of the site's volunteer guides, with wide views over the hotel, the campsite and out to the Mutirikwi dam. It is steeper and harder work than the Modern Path.
Permit: Included in the entry ticket
ATC News, Great Zimbabwe as seen through the eyes of a local tour guide (Prosper Mutero, July 2016)
Staying safe in Great Zimbabwe
- Malaria
- Masvingo sits at 1,075 m, under the 1,200 m line in the UK travel health advice. Below that line NaTHNaC rates the malaria risk high from November to June and advises tablets (atovaquone-proguanil, doxycycline or mefloquine); from July to October it rates the risk low and advises bite avoidance. See a doctor straight away about any fever of 38°C or more from a week after arriving, and about any malaria-like symptoms up to a year after you get home. source
- Heat and sun
- The usual advice is to stay out of the midday sun between 11 and 2. September and October are the hottest months. Pack water, a wide-brimmed hat and sunscreen, and an umbrella helps for shade. There is a large shady picnic area at the entrance if someone in your group would rather sit out the climb. source
- Baboons and monkeys
- The monkeys and baboons on the site are used to people. NMMZ's policy is that visitors do not feed them, so keep food out of sight at the picnic area and on the hill. An animal that learns people mean food ends up a problem for everyone who comes after you. source
- The walls
- The walls are dry stone with no mortar, and people climbing them, walking over the archaeological deposits and wearing down the paths is a continuing source of damage. Stay on the paths, do not climb or sit on any wall, do not move a stone, and watch your footing in the narrow passages of the Great Enclosure, where the walls stand as high as 11 m. source
- The road from Beitbridge and Harare
- The UK Foreign Office names the Masvingo to Beitbridge road for vehicle break-ins, and advises against driving outside the main towns at night because of deep potholes, stray livestock and vehicles without lights, cyclists and heavy trucks included. Stop when signalled at roadblocks and toll gates, and get a receipt for any fine. source
- Lake Mutirikwi
- ZimParks warns of crocodiles along the shore and hippos in the lake, and tells visitors to keep back from the edge of the dam wall. Keep out of the water. source
Tips from travellers
- Opening time is usually 8 and closing 5, and arriving early means you do the hill before the worst of the heat. Most people need about four hours for the whole site, a fast walker a couple, and there is a small café past the entrance. April to September is the dry, pleasant time; the aloes flower from May to August, and June and July nights get frosty while the days stay warm. one source
- Hire a guide at the entrance, if only for the route and the main sights; their knowledge varies. For more depth, Expert Africa suggests booking a private guide with an archaeology background through your tour company. one source
- Without a car, the minibus combis from Masvingo leave from behind the TM supermarket once they fill up, take about 20 minutes, and drop you at a turn-off about 2 km from the gate. From there you walk past a craft market and through the Great Zimbabwe Hotel grounds to the ruins. Taxis run from Masvingo too. one source
- Bring US dollar cash for the gate, the guide, the café and the curio shop. There is no cash machine or supermarket at the monument; the nearest cash machines are in Masvingo, 25 km away. Change is scarce in Zimbabwe, so carry small notes. one source
- NMMZ runs a campsite next to the main gate, with cooking places, toilets and showers, and firewood for sale. One overlander who camped there in August 2025 says the entry ticket stays valid into the next day, so he watched the sunset from the Hill Complex, walked the Great Enclosure at night with nobody else about and looked round again in the morning. One night is enough for the ruins; add a second only for the lake. one source
- If you have a spare afternoon, a rhino walk in the Mutirikwi park near the lake is the thing to do. Lodges on the lake offer it, and Expert Africa says white rhino are regularly seen by visitors on foot. ZimParks puts the park about 30 km east of Masvingo. one source
Checked 19 October 2026. Conditions change, so confirm with the park or venue before you go.
Goat's blood on the steps: the medium who moved into the ruins
On a Sunday night in August 1980 somebody killed a goat at the eastern entrance of the Great Enclosure, splashed its blood over the steps and walls and dragged the body to the Conical Tower. A white chicken had its throat cut and was left at the tower. Traditional beer was poured on the lemon trees outside the curio shop. Cran Cooke, the regional director of the newly renamed National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, wrote it all up for head office and added his real worry: if this went on, tourism could suffer. His staff were sure who was behind it, though Cooke admitted there was no proof.
The woman who claimed to be Nehanda
Sophia Tsvatayi Muchini had first come to the ruins in 1974, saying she was the medium of Nehanda, the ancestral spirit whose medium the settlers hanged in Salisbury in 1898. Through the war she helped guerrillas. She was jailed in 1978 and again in 1979, and came back after the elections of February 1980 to find the museum staff back too.
Cooke’s list of complaints, sent a week or so before independence, is a wonderful read. Her people were cutting bamboo, keeping chickens and building huts on monument land. She told visitors that only Europeans had to pay to go in, made the labourers take their boots off in the ruins, told at least one white visitor to do the same, and put stones across the road that got in the way of the lorries and of a rabid jackal trapping exercise. Worst of all, she had taken stones out of the Conical Tower and left offerings in the holes. A deputy minister wrote a note asking that she be left alone. In June the police destroyed her hut anyway.
She moved just outside the boundary and kept going. Ex-guerrillas and soldiers of the new national army came to her, the police thought, to be cleansed after the war. The Minister of Health, Dr Ushewokunze, visited more than once, and the ruling party bought livestock and millet for a beer ceremony at the ruins over Independence weekend in 1981, with remains of the dead from the Chimoio camp in Mozambique to be buried there. The millet went bad first. On 27 March 1981, after a gun battle at her home, she was arrested. The charge was that she had ordered guerrillas to kill the white people living around the ruins. Two double murders were put at her door, of Abraham and Margaret Roux and of Helena van As and her grandson Philip. Guerrillas already convicted testified against her, and so, after nine months in custody, did her own children. On 18 December 1981 the High Court sentenced her to death. Ushewokunze, sacked in October, had denied any part in the murders, and Mr Justice Pitman called his denial “bald and unconvincing”. She was pardoned and was back near the ruins by 1986. The researcher Joost Fontein, who visited her three times between 1997 and 2001, found her in skins and copper bangles, furious, and still calling it God’s hill.
Why the hill went quiet
Fontein’s thesis takes its title from what the local clans told him. Elders of the Nemanwa, Mugabe and Charumbira people, who have long argued over which of them the site belongs to, said Great Zimbabwe used to make noise. Aiden Nemanwa described voices speaking Shona, cattle and goats that could be heard but not seen, all of it stopping when the colonisers arrived. A Charumbira medium did the animal noises for him. Chief Nemanwa said the voice simply moved to the Matopos when the whites came, the hills where Mwari is consulted at the Matonjeni shrines.
A four-legged pot, pfuko yeNevanji, is said to have bitten off the hand of a man who tried to take its gold. A healer who dances for tourists told Fontein the hill was a place to go to sleep and be told in a dream what to do, and that a bad person would be chased off it by a leopard. When she went up with a film crew, a big baboon blocked the path until they put down snuff and asked politely. Many elders put the silence down to the authorities ignoring local custom, and kept asking for a national ceremony at the ruins to thank the spirits for independence. When Fontein finished his thesis in 2003 it still had not been held.
Mediums have even steered a dig. In March 2021 a Herald columnist reported a medium using an ephod to find the spot near the main entrance where an ancestor called Bvumavaranda was said to have sunk into a swamp, and a team led by an archaeologist digging there in water and mud.
Dates on the move
The archaeologists have their own trouble with the past here. Richard Hall cleared the Great Enclosure between 1902 and 1904 in the name of preservation, and later Public Works crews dug into the Hill Complex trying to stop its western wall falling. So much evidence was destroyed that the walls are hard to date. Garlake’s 1973 dates ran from the 12th to the 15th century. A Bayesian model published in Antiquity in 2013 by Shadreck Chirikure and three colleagues puts the first stone walls at the end of the 12th or start of the 13th century and the peak in the 14th and 15th, and has the city overlapping with Mapungubwe.
What it is like now
Expert Africa calls the site little visited. The writer behind one long-running Zimbabwe guide found it sometimes haunting, and singles out the Parallel Passage, a narrow walkway between walls about 11 m high with trees moving overhead. Fontein wrote that the drums and mbira drifting over from the performers’ village at least filled the silence the elders complained of. Whether that counts as the voices coming back depends on who you ask, and at Great Zimbabwe somebody has always been asking.
In and around Great Zimbabwe
18 places listedWhere to stay in Great Zimbabwe 5
- 20.27°S 30.93°EHostelGreat Zimbabwe Family LodgesGreat Zimbabwe
- 20.27°S 30.95°EHotelAt the Ancient City
- 20.27°S 30.93°ECampsiteCampsite Great Zimbabwe Ruins
- 20.27°S 30.93°EGuest houseGreat Zimbabwe Family Lodges Rondavels
- 20.26°S 30.92°EHotelGreat Zimbabwe Lodge
Sights 11
- Great ZimbabweArchaeological site
- Eastern EnclosureArchaeological site
- Great EnclosureArchaeological site
- Great Zimbabwe MuseumMuseum
- Hill RuinsArchaeological site
- Mauch RuinsArchaeological site
- Renders RuinsArchaeological site
- Ridge EnclosureArchaeological site
- Ruin Nr. 1Archaeological site
- Western EnclosureArchaeological site
Restaurants and cafes 2
- Great Zimbabwe Ruins RestaurantRestaurant
- Curios & DrinksCafe
Quick answers
How much is the entry fee for Great Zimbabwe?
International visitors pay US$15 (about €13.50 or £11) per adult and US$8 per child per visit. These rates apply from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2026 and are set by National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ).
Do Zimbabwens and SADC citizens pay less at Great Zimbabwe?
Zimbabwean residents pay US$5 per adult per visit. You need ID or a passport to get the lower rate.
When were these Great Zimbabwe fees last checked?
We last checked them on 18 October 2026 against 4 published sources. We re-check every two weeks, but always confirm with National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ) before you travel.
What animals can you see in Great Zimbabwe?
You have a good chance of seeing baboons, monkeys, herons, egrets, storks and ducks. Buffalo and leopard are there but rarely seen.
What are the best hikes in Great Zimbabwe?
The full circuit: museum, Hill Complex, Valley Ruins and Great Enclosure, Hill Complex by the Modern Path and Hill Complex by the Ancient (Traditional) Ascent (0.46 km). See the hikes section for times, difficulty and permits.
Great Zimbabwe and the parks nearest it
| Park | International adult | Distance | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Great Zimbabwe | US$15 €13 | · | Masvingo |
| Lake Mutirikwi Recreational Park | US$5 €4 | 12 km | Masvingo |
| Antelope Park | US$5 €4 | 154 km | Midlands |
| Sebakwe Dam Recreational Park | US$5 €4 | 154 km | Midlands |
Where the Great Zimbabwe fees come from
- NMMZ online ticket shop, Monument and Site Entrance Fee (per-ticket prices in the shop's product data; page last edited 11 May 2026)
- NMMZ, Visit page (opening hours and the US$0 to US$15 fee range)
- NMMZ, Regional Museums (children under five free, reduced rates for school parties)
- Great Zimbabwe Guide, Great Zimbabwe Monument and Ruins travel guide (prices last checked March 2024, page updated November 2025)
Open data: all park fees (CSV) · JSON (CC BY 4.0)
Cite as: Travel Africa Guide, "Great Zimbabwe fees 2026", checked 18 October 2026, https://travelafrica.guide/zimbabwe/great-zimbabwe/
Map of Great Zimbabwe
See every place on this map as a list