Harare Audioguides

Harare was founded on September 12, 1890 by a column of British settlers who planted a flag on the Highveld plateau and named it Fort Salisbury, after the British Prime Minister. It was capital of Southern Rhodesia, then Zimbabwe Rhodesia, then Zimbabwe. On April 18, 1982, two years after independence, it was renamed Harare, from the Shona chief Neharawa whose village had occupied the site before any fort was built. At 1,483 meters elevation with a subtropical highland climate, the city has mild temperatures almost year-round -- warm wet summers and cool dry winters without the extremes you might expect this close to the equator.

The downtown area still contains stone buildings from the 1890s, some barely changed.

Parliament House, built in 1895 on Baker Avenue, remains in use. The Eastgate Centre, a shopping mall opened in 1996, was designed using passive cooling technology modeled on termite mound ventilation -- no conventional air conditioning, heat managed instead through chimneys and thermal mass. It was a cited example of biomimicry before that word was in common use.