Nairobi: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
Nairobi exists because of a swamp. In 1899 the Uganda Railway reached a flat, watered stretch of Maasai grazing land at 1,795 metres — the last level ground before the Rift escarpment — and the engineers stopped to build a depot and workshops. The Maasai called it Enkare Nyirobi, the place of cool water. Within six years the depot was the capital of British East Africa. Two hours, flat, on pavement. Do it on a Sunday morning: the central business district empties completely and becomes walkable, which on a Tuesday it is not.
A short history of Nairobi
Nairobi began in 1899 as a camp on the railway that the British were building from the coast at Mombasa to Lake Victoria, on swampy ground that the Maasai called "the place of cool waters". In 1905 it replaced Mombasa as the capital of the British East Africa colony. In 1963 Kenya became independent and Nairobi became its capital. On 7 August 1998 a truck bomb exploded near the United States embassy in the city, and more than 200 people were killed. Today the city is home to the headquarters of the United Nations Environment Programme, and on its edge is a national park where wild animals roam against a backdrop of skyscrapers.
The ten best sights in Nairobi
1Nairobi National Park$80 for non-residents. The only national park inside a capital city. Verified 10/2026
2Sheldrick Wildlife TrustOne public hour, 11:00 to 12:00, and you must book ahead. Verified 10/2026
3Giraffe Centre1,500 shillings for non-residents, 09:00–17:00 daily. Verified 10/2026
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4Nairobi Safari Walk
A boardwalk over enclosures at the park gate; for when a drive is too much
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5Animal Orphanage
Next to the park gate, and it takes in animals found injured
6Karen Blixen MuseumAbout $18 for non-residents; booked on eCitizen before you arrive. Verified 10/2026
7Bomas of Kenya$20 for non-residents. Homesteads of sixteen peoples, and a daily dance show. Verified 10/2026
8Giraffe ManorThe hotel where giraffes put their heads through the window; booked a year out
9KICC105 metres, opened 1973, and the rooftop helipad is the city viewpoint
10August 7th Memorial ParkOn the site of the 1998 embassy bombing; 213 people were killed here
Scan with your phone camera to open the map there
What is an audio walk?
Tours in Nairobi →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Nairobi:
Free walking tours in Nairobi
The city the railway put down
Nairobi exists because of a swamp. In 1899 the Uganda Railway reached a flat, watered stretch of Maasai grazing land at 1,795 metres — the last level ground before the Rift escarpment — and the engineers stopped to build a depot and workshops. The Maasai called it Enkare Nyirobi, the place of cool water. Within six years the depot was the capital of British East Africa. Two hours, flat, on pavement. Do it on a Sunday morning: the central business district empties completely and becomes walkable, which on a Tuesday it is not.
- Nairobi Railway Station · The station is the reason there is a city here and nothing else. The Uganda Railway was called the Lunatic Line in the British parliament — it cost more than five million pounds, it had no obvious purpose, and thirty-two thousand indentured labourers were brought from India to build it, of whom around two and a half thousand died. The ones who survived and stayed are why Nairobi has an Indian quarter, a Jamia mosque and fabric shops on Biashara Street.
- Railway Museum · In the yard stands the carriage from which Charles Ryall, a police superintendent, was dragged and killed by a lion at Kima in 1900 — he had been lying in wait for it with a rifle and fell asleep. The man-eaters of Tsavo, which killed railway workers further down the line, are the other half of that story, and their skins ended up in Chicago. The museum is small, dusty and entirely unrestored, which is the point.
- Haile Selassie Avenue · The avenue was Nairobi’s first proper boulevard and it was renamed for the Ethiopian emperor, which tells you something specific: Ethiopia was the one African state that had never been colonised, and newly independent Kenya named its streets accordingly. The ones around you are Kenyatta, Moi, Tom Mboya, Luthuli — all of them replaced names like Delamere and Victoria within a few years of 1963.
- KICC · Started in 1967 and finished in 1973, one hundred and five metres and twenty-eight floors, and for decades it was the tallest building in Kenya. The architect was Norwegian, Karl Henrik Nøstvik, working with a Kenyan colleague, and the shapes are deliberate: the tower is a cylinder, the plenary hall a set of cuboids, and the amphitheatre and the rooftop helipad are both cones — a reading of a traditional African homestead in concrete. The helipad is open to visitors and is the only place the whole city is visible.
- Parliament Buildings · Jomo Kenyatta is buried in a mausoleum in these grounds, not in a cemetery, and the choice was deliberate — his successor wanted the founding president kept at the seat of the state. The clock tower was finished in 1954, nine years before independence, which means the parliament of colonial Kenya and the parliament of the republic are the same building and the same chamber.
- Uhuru Park · In 1989 the government planned a sixty-storey tower with a statue of the president in this park. Wangari Maathai wrote letters — to the World Bank, to the press, to anyone — and was called a madwoman in parliament for it. The foreign financing withdrew and the tower was never built. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, the first African woman to do so, and the park you are standing in is the reason.
Who actually built the centre
The streets north of the City Market are the oldest commercial part of Nairobi and they were built by Indian traders — the dukawallahs who followed the railway, stayed, and opened shops. This is a quarter of fabric by the metre, hardware, spice, silver and samosas, and it still works the way it did in 1920: one trade to a street, the family above the shop. Ninety minutes, dense, and busy from eight in the morning. Carry small notes and expect to be asked in.
- Jamia Mosque · Three silver domes and two minarets, built in stages and completed in the 1920s by the city’s Indian Muslim community — most of them descendants of railway labourers and traders from Gujarat and Punjab. It sits in the middle of the bazaar rather than on a civic square, because it was built by the people who were already trading there and not by a government. Non-Muslims may visit outside prayer times, modestly dressed.
- Biashara Street · Biashara is Swahili for business, and the street was called Bazaar Street before independence. It sells one thing: cloth. Kitenge and kikoy by the metre, from shops that have been in the same families for three and four generations, and the price is always negotiated. The tailors are upstairs and around the corner — a dress bought here is cut to you in two days for a fraction of what the mall charges.
- Nairobi City Market · A single art-deco hall from the 1930s, built by the colonial council as a covered market for Europeans, and now one of the loudest buildings in the city. The ground floor is flowers, fish and butchery; the galleries above and the lanes outside are curios, and the asking price there is routinely four times the closing price. Kenya is the third largest cut-flower exporter in the world and much of it passes through here first.
- McMillan Library · Opened in June 1931 with two stone lions at the door, and for its first twenty-seven years it was open to Europeans only — that was written into law in 1938 and lifted only in 1958, five years before independence. It then fell apart for decades. A Kenyan trust called Book Bunk restored it in the last few years, and the reading room is in use again.
- Kenya National Archives · The building was a branch of the Bank of India and the ground floor is now a free gallery of the Murumbi collection — Joseph Murumbi, Kenya’s second vice-president, son of a Goan trader and a Maasai mother, who resigned after eighteen months and spent the rest of his life collecting African art, books and stamps. His collection is one of the largest ever assembled privately in Africa, and the state bought it from him when he ran out of money.
- River Road · This is where the matatus are, and the matatu is the actual public transport of Nairobi: privately owned minibuses, around twenty thousand of them, each one painted, named and fitted with a sound system, competing for passengers with a conductor hanging out of the door. There is no metro and the commuter trains carry a fraction of the city. Nothing here runs to a timetable; the route number on the side is the only fixed thing.
The trees that stood in front of the bulldozer
Nairobi has more forest inside it than any other capital of its size, and almost none of it survived by accident — each piece was fought for, usually in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, usually against a government that had already allocated the land. This walk is the green half of the city and the political story that goes with it. Two and a half hours with one short taxi hop at the end. Mornings are cool at this altitude; it can rain hard in April and November.
- Jeevanjee Gardens · Given to the city in 1906 by Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee, a Karachi-born contractor who had supplied the labour for the railway and then became the richest man in British East Africa — he also founded the newspaper that is now the Standard. He put a statue of Queen Victoria in the middle of the park, which is still there. Developers have tried to take this plot twice; his granddaughter fought it in court in the nineties and won.
- Nairobi Gallery · Built in 1913 as the provincial commissioner’s office, and the civil servants called it Hatches, Matches and Dispatches — births, marriages and deaths were all registered in this one building. It is now six rooms of the Murumbi African Heritage Collection: beadwork, textiles, currency and one of the most important Pan-African stamp collections in the world. The building is also the zero point from which all distances in Kenya were measured.
- Nairobi National Museum · The reason to come is one room: the hominid gallery, which holds casts and in some cases originals of the finds that made Kenya the centre of human-origins research — including Turkana Boy, a nearly complete skeleton of a Homo erectus adolescent found by Kamoya Kimeu in 1984 and dated to about 1.6 million years ago. The Leakey family worked out of this institution for three generations. Eighteen dollars for non-residents, verified 10/2026.
- Nairobi Arboretum · Planted in 1907 as a trial plantation — the railway burned wood and nobody knew which imported species would grow at this altitude, so the forestry department planted several hundred of them side by side and waited. Many of the tall exotics in the city centre are descendants of these test trees. It is thirty hectares, it is where Nairobi runs on a Saturday, and the entry fee is nominal.
- City Park · Sixty hectares of remnant indigenous forest with a resident troop of vervet monkeys, and inside it the Murumbi memorial gardens, where Joseph and Sheila Murumbi are buried — he asked to be buried here rather than in the national heroes’ cemetery. Large parts of the park were illegally allocated to private developers in the nineties and were recovered only after a long campaign by neighbourhood associations.
- Karura Forest · One thousand hectares of forest inside a capital city, with a waterfall, a marsh and caves that Mau Mau fighters used in the fifties. In 1998 the government began allocating it to political allies; Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement came here to plant trees and were attacked by private security in January 1999, and she was hospitalised. Protests ran until August, when the president banned all public land allocations. The forest is fenced and safe now, and you pay 696 shillings as a non-resident — verified 10/2026.
Getting to Nairobi and getting around
- Jomo Kenyatta Airport · 18 kilometres southeast, and the busiest hub in East Africa
- Wilson Airport · The small-plane airport; this is where safari flights leave from
- Nairobi Terminus · The fast train to Mombasa leaves from Syokimau, 18 kilometres out — not from the old station
- Nairobi Railway Station · The 1899 station the city was built around; commuter trains only now
- Country Bus Station · On Landhies Road; buses and matatus to the rest of Kenya
Cheap eats in Nairobi
Kenyan street food is built around one grill and one pot: meat over charcoal, and maize flour. You choose the meat raw, by weight, and it comes back chopped on a wooden board with a salt-and-chilli dip and a tomato-onion salad — there is no menu and no plate. Everything here costs between fifty and nine hundred shillings. Pay cash or by phone; nobody in Kenya carries a card for food.
- Nyama choma at Kenyatta Market · About 700 to 900 shillings a kilo; 40 minutes
- Smokie pasua · 50 shillings; look for the box on a bicycle
- Mutura · From dusk; buy where there is a queue
- Mandazi and chai · 20 shillings each; the morning kiosks
- Indian food at Diamond Plaza · Cheap, genuine, and busiest Sunday evening
- Mama Oliech · One dish, done properly; go early
- Githeri · Under 100 shillings; canteens and kiosks
- Mahindi choma · 20 to 30 shillings; at every junction
Museums in Nairobi
Nairobi’s museums divide cleanly into two subjects: human origins, because Kenya holds more early hominid fossils than anywhere else on earth, and the colonial century, because the city itself is only about a hundred and twenty-five years old and every public building in the centre dates from it. Museum fees were raised across the board in May 2026 and non-residents now pay in dollars. Verified 10/2026.
- Nairobi National Museum · $18, or $25 with the snake park. Verified 10/2026
- Karen Blixen Museum · About $18; book on eCitizen first. Verified 10/2026
- Nairobi Gallery · Small and overlooked; an hour is enough
- Railway Museum · Rust and no air conditioning; worth it
- Kenya National Archives · Free; the ground floor is the collection
- Bomas of Kenya · $20; the dance show is mid-afternoon. Verified 10/2026
- McMillan Library · Free; the reading room is in use again
- August 7th Memorial Park · A small fee; quiet in the middle of the centre
Nature and day trips near Nairobi
This is the only capital city on earth with a national park inside its boundary, and that is not a slogan: the park is a hundred and seventeen square kilometres, it holds lions, rhino and giraffe, and its northern fence is seven kilometres from the central business district. Everything in this group is within an hour of the centre, and most of it is a conservation story as much as a place.
- Nairobi National Park · $80, pay online. Four of the Big Five, no elephants. Verified 10/2026
- Karura Forest · 696 shillings for non-residents; card only. Verified 10/2026
- Ngong Hills · A ranger walks with every group; 12 kilometres end to end
- Sheldrick Wildlife Trust · 11:00 to 12:00 only, booked ahead. Verified 10/2026
- Giraffe Centre · 1,500 shillings; 09:00 to 17:00 daily. Verified 10/2026
- Nairobi Arboretum · Nominal fee; busiest Saturday morning
- Oloolua Nature Trail · Take a torch; almost empty on weekdays
- Lake Naivasha and Hell’s Gate · 79 kilometres; bicycles for hire at the gate
Holy places in Nairobi
Nairobi is a city of three religious histories arriving within thirty years of each other: Anglican and Catholic missions that came with the colonial administration, Islam that came with the Swahili coast and the Indian labourers, and Hindu and Sikh temples built by the railway communities. They are all within a kilometre of one another in the centre, which is unusual, and all of them are open to visitors.
- Holy Family Basilica · Open and free; Sunday mass is in several languages
- All Saints Cathedral · Free; the choir on Sunday morning
- Jamia Mosque · Visit outside prayer times, dressed modestly
- Sikh Temple Nairobi · Head covered; langar is served to anyone
- Hindu temples at Parklands · Shoes off; ask before entering
- Kenyatta mausoleum · Seen from the street only; no photographs
Things to do in Nairobi with kids
- Giraffe Centre · A platform at head height and pellets included; the one sure win
- Sheldrick orphanage · Baby elephants at eleven; book ahead or you will not get in
- Nairobi Safari Walk · A boardwalk over enclosures; an hour and no car needed
- Animal Orphanage · At the park gate; lions and cheetahs up close, in enclosures
- Snake Park · Next to the museum and included in the $25 combined ticket
- Mamba Village · Crocodiles, ostrich rides and a camel; unashamedly for children
- Two Rivers Mall · A ferris wheel on the roof and an indoor play floor; the rain plan
- Paradise Lost · Caves behind a waterfall, rowing boats and horses, 20 kilometres north
Nightlife in Nairobi
Nairobi goes out late and it goes out in two places: Westlands, which is dense, loud and walkable between venues, and Kilimani and Lavington, which are quieter and more expensive. Kenyan beer is Tusker, named in 1922 after a brewery founder killed by an elephant. Do not walk between venues after dark anywhere — a taxi app ride across Westlands costs a couple of dollars and that is simply how it is done.
- Westlands · Friday and Saturday until about four
- Carnivore · Fixed price per head; the Dawa was invented here
- Nairobi Street Kitchen · One arrival, one exit; busiest Thursday to Saturday
- Kenya National Theatre · Check the programme first; it is irregular
- Kilimani and Lavington · Closes around midnight; the Ethiopian food is the pick
- KICC rooftop at dusk · Closes before dark; a small fee at the desk
Frequently asked questions about Nairobi
What is there to see in Nairobi?
The top sights in Nairobi are Nairobi National Park, Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and Giraffe Centre. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Nairobi?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Nairobi without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Nairobi?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Nairobi, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The city the railway put down.
How do you get to Nairobi and get around?
The main ways are Jomo Kenyatta Airport, Wilson Airport and Nairobi Terminus. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Nairobi, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Nairobi that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Nairobi for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.