Which ruined city in Zimbabwe is the largest stone structure in sub-Saharan Africa?

Which ruined city in Zimbabwe is the largest stone structure in sub-Saharan Africa? Great Zimbabwe is the canonical answer. Its monumental dry-stone walls make it the largest known stone-built complex in precolonial Southern Africa and one of Africa’s most important archaeological sites.

The city developed between roughly the 11th and 15th centuries and served as the capital of the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe. Its builders, ancestors of present-day Shona-speaking peoples, used carefully stacked granite blocks without mortar. The site covers about 7.22 square kilometres and is organized into the Hill Complex, Valley Complex, and Great Enclosure.

The Great Enclosure is the best-known structure, with curved walls that reach about 11 metres high. Great Zimbabwe was not an isolated settlement: gold, cattle, agriculture, craft production, and long-distance trade linked it to the Swahili coast and the wider Indian Ocean world. Imported beads and ceramics provide evidence of those connections.

Colonial-era writers wrongly claimed that Africans could not have built the ruins, but archaeology established their local African origin. Great Zimbabwe became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986 and inspired the name of the modern country.