Watamu

The bays at Watamu were a small Giriama and Swahili fishing settlement for centuries, in the shadow of far larger neighbours. A few kilometres inland stood Gedi, a walled Swahili town of coral-rag houses, mosques and a palace that flourished from the 11th or 12th century, traded with the wider Indian Ocean and was abandoned in the 17th century for reasons still argued over — water, raids from the north, or shifting trade. Its ruins, swallowed by forest, became one of the best-known archaeological sites on the East African coast and were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2024.

The colonial period brought sisal and the coast road but changed the village little. What transformed Watamu was the sea itself: in 1968 Kenya gazetted the marine national park over the reefs and lagoons offshore, one of the country's first marine parks and created in the same year as Malindi's, and the reef became the reason to come. Small hotels went up along the bays from the 1970s, many of them built or run by Italians who had begun holidaying at nearby Malindi.

Since then Watamu has grown as a low-rise, low-key resort with a strong conservation streak — turtle protection, mangrove replanting and community tourism in the creek villages sit alongside the hotels. Tourism here fell sharply during the travel warnings of the mid-2010s and again in 2020, and the slow recovery, along with pressure on the forest and the reef, shapes local debate.

Watamu sits on the line between the Swahili coast and Mijikenda country. The village is mostly Muslim, with the call to prayer marking the day, while the surrounding farmland is Giriama, one of the nine Mijikenda peoples whose sacred kaya groves in the coastal forest, eleven of them listed by UNESCO in 2008, are still tended by elders. Both traditions treat the forest as more than scenery.

Conservation has become part of local identity in a way it is not in every beach town. Fishermen work with the turtle project that buys back accidentally caught turtles for release, creek communities run the mangrove boardwalk and crab farming themselves, and forest guides from villages around Arabuko-Sokoke make a living from birdwatchers who come for species found nowhere else. Plenty of friction remains over fishing rules and park boundaries.

The Italian presence, decades old and shared with Malindi, shows in menus, in the languages spoken in the hotels and in a small resident community. Away from that, the manners are those of the coast: modest dress in the village, greetings before business, patience with a slow afternoon, and bargaining done in a friendly register. Taarab and Giriama drumming appear at weddings, and Eid brings the village out in new clothes.

Watamu is a small town rather than a city — about 30,000 people in 2020, in the settlement and the surrounding wards of Kilifi County, and the figures swell and shrink with the tourist season. Fishing remains the base: boats go out before dawn, the catch is sold at the landing site and through a co-operative, and hotels buy much of it. Tourism provides the wages that matter, from hotel and dive-centre work to guiding, boat crews, curio stalls and construction.

Behind the beach, households farm maize, cassava, coconuts and cashews, and in the creek villages crab farming and beekeeping have grown as alternatives to cutting mangroves. Income is highly seasonal, with April and May, when the rains come and hotels close, the hard months of the year. Young people leave for Malindi, Mombasa or Nairobi when work runs out.

Days follow the tide as much as the clock: low water brings people onto the flats to fish, glean and walk, and the village fills again in the cool of the evening. Water supply, waste, the pressure of new building on the shoreline and the long-running question of who benefits from the parks are the recurring local issues.

Watamu eats what the boats bring in, cooked in the Swahili manner: fish and octopus grilled over charcoal, prawns and crab in coconut sauce, and mchuzi wa samaki, a spiced coconut fish curry, with wali wa nazi — rice cooked in coconut milk — or chapati. Mud crab from Mida Creek is the local speciality, farmed by the creek villages and cooked simply with coconut and lime.

Everyday food away from the hotels is Kenyan and Giriama: ugali with sukuma wiki or beans, githeri, cassava and roasted maize from a brazier. Breakfast is mahamri, coconut-milk buns scented with cardamom, with mbaazi, pigeon peas in coconut, and strong milky chai. Street snacks include mishkaki skewers, viazi karai and samosas, and pilau or biryani mark weddings and Eid.

Fruit is a serious matter here — mangoes in their season, passion fruit, tamarind, custard apples, and coconuts drunk from the husk and then scraped for their flesh. The Italian presence adds pizza, pasta and espresso along the beach road, and mnazi, tapped palm wine, remains the traditional drink of the Mijikenda countryside, with Tusker the standard beer in the hotels.