Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is a country in Africa.

It has no sea coast. Most of the land is high and flat. Big rivers flow along its edges. The capital city is Harare.

Zimbabwe is in southern Africa. It is landlocked, which means it has no coast on the sea. South Africa is to the south, Botswana to the west, Zambia to the north and Mozambique to the east.

Almost all of Zimbabwe is more than 300 meters above sea level. A high ridge called the Highveld runs across the middle of the country, and the land slopes down to the Zambezi River in the north and the Limpopo River in the south. The capital, Harare, is in the northeast.

Zimbabwe is a landlocked country of southern Africa. It shares a 200 km border with South Africa to the south and is bounded by Botswana to the southwest and west, Zambia to the north and Mozambique to the northeast and east. The capital is Harare, formerly Salisbury.

The country lies almost entirely above 300 m. Its spine is the Highveld, a broad ridge about 640 km long and 80 km wide running from southwest to northeast at roughly 1,200 to 1,500 m; it covers about a quarter of the country. On either side the Middleveld, about two-fifths of the area, slopes toward the Zambezi and the Limpopo, and beyond it, mostly in the south, lies the Lowveld. ZimStat's 2022 census counted 15,178,957 people on 390,757 km² of land, an average of 39 people per square kilometer.

Great Zimbabwe is a very old stone city.

People built tall stone walls there long ago. One wall makes a giant oval. Harare and Bulawayo are big cities today.

Great Zimbabwe, near the town of Masvingo, is the ruin of a city built between about 1100 and 1450. Its builders, Shona people, made walls of granite blocks. The Great Enclosure, an oval wall from the 1300s, surrounds a narrow passage and a tall cone-shaped tower. It has been a World Heritage Site since 1986.

Today the two main cities are Harare, the capital, and Bulawayo in the southwest. Near Bulawayo are the stone ruins of Khami and the granite Matobo Hills, where people painted on the rocks thousands of years ago.

UNESCO describes Great Zimbabwe (inscribed 1986), about 30 km from Masvingo, as a unique testimony to the Bantu civilization of the Shona between the 11th and 15th centuries. Built between 1100 and 1450 and covering almost 800 ha, it has three groups: the Hill Ruins, continuously inhabited from the 11th to 15th centuries; the Great Enclosure, an ellipse of cut granite blocks laid in regular courses, dating to the 14th century and enclosing living quarters and a high conical tower; and the Valley Ruins. Six soapstone posts topped with birds were found in the Hill Ruins.

Khami (inscribed 1986), 22 km from Bulawayo, developed after Great Zimbabwe was abandoned; Spanish porcelain, Rhineland stoneware and Ming porcelain found there show long-distance trade. The Matobo Hills (inscribed 2003), some 35 km south of Bulawayo, have one of the highest concentrations of rock art in southern Africa, at least 13,000 years old. Britannica calls the Great Enclosure, with an outer wall about 250 m around and up to 11 m high, the largest single ancient structure in sub-Saharan Africa; soapstone bird figures found in the ruins became the Zimbabwe Bird on the national flag.

Zimbabwe has round granite hills.

Some rocks balance on top of other rocks. The Zambezi River makes a giant waterfall. A big dam on the river made a huge lake.

Most of Zimbabwe sits on very old granite rock. In the Matobo Hills, wind and water have worn the granite into odd shapes, and some big blocks seem to balance on top of others. Small rounded granite hills, called kopjes, are found all over the country.

On the Zambezi, Victoria Falls is more than 1.7 kilometers wide. Its spray can be seen from about 50 kilometers away. Farther down the river, Kariba Dam holds back Lake Kariba. The highest point is Mount Nyangani (Inyangani), 2,592 meters, in the eastern highlands.

About four-fifths of Zimbabwe's ancient basement rock is granite; the Matopo (Matobo) Hills south of Bulawayo formed from the long erosion of a granite batholith, leaving balancing rocks and countless kopjes. The Great Dyke, up to about 13 km wide and some 530 km long, crosses the country from north to south; Britannica calls it the longest linear mass of mafic and ultramafic rock in the world, rich in chromium, nickel and platinum. The highest point, Mount Inyangani (Nyangani), reaches 2,592 m in the eastern highlands; the lowest, about 200 m, is near Dumela, where the Limpopo enters Mozambique.

Faulting formed the middle Zambezi trough, now partly flooded by Lake Kariba. UNESCO's Mosi-oa-Tunya/Victoria Falls (inscribed 1989), shared with Zambia, is 1,708 m wide and up to 108 m deep, with up to 500 million liters a minute falling into the first of a zigzag series of eight basalt gorges. Although within the tropics, the high plateau has a subtropical climate. The eastern highlands get the heaviest rain, with a rainy season from October into April that is longer than elsewhere, and the cool, dry winter lasts from May to August.