Zanzibar Diving: Mnemba, Menai Bay, the Stone Town Wrecks and the Fees at Each

Zanzibar’s conservation-area fee rose to $10 on 1 September 2025

The Ministry of Blue Economy and Fisheries revised the entry fees for Zanzibar’s marine conservation areas with effect from 1 September 2025. The list covers the Mnemba Island Conservation Area, the Menai Bay Conservation Area, the combined area for Chumbe and the Changuu-Bawe islands off Stone Town, and the Pemba Channel Conservation Area on the second island.

A visitor from outside the East African Community pays $10 per adult, meaning anyone aged 16 or over, and $5 per child aged 5 to 15, with children under five free. Two of the three reports of the notice say the rate is per day. Foreigners who are residents of Tanzania pay $5 and $3. East African citizens pay TZS 5,000 and TZS 2,500.

The ministry’s own budget speeches show how much the fee carries. The line for visitor entry fees at Menai Bay and Mnemba brought in TZS 3.09 billion between July 2024 and March 2025. Over the same nine months a year later, the first under the new rates, it brought in TZS 7.12 billion, already 105 percent of the full-year estimate.

The conservation program runs on it. Of the TZS 3.86 billion the marine conservation program had received by March 2026, TZS 3.75 billion was retention of the conservation department’s own collections, against TZS 29 million in salaries. By June 2024 the department had also started collecting through the ZanMalipo payment system, so ask your dive center whether its price already includes the fee.

More people are paying it. The Ministry of Tourism and Heritage reported 917,167 tourist arrivals in 2025, up 24.5 percent on 736,755 in 2024. A 2009 government guide already said visitors would pay a fee to maintain the areas and build livelihoods in the fishing villages around them.

Mnemba Atoll off Zanzibar has an inner ring with a $25 fee

The Mnemba Island Marine Conservation Area was officially created in 2002, according to that government guide, and it is far larger than the atoll. It runs along the coast from the Michamwi peninsula round to Kendwa in the north, as a multiple-use area where only sustainable fishing gear is allowed. The house reef on the north-western side of the island was declared a no-fishing zone.

Inside it sits a second, smaller layer. The ministry’s June 2024 budget speech reports that its agreement with &Beyond, the company running the tourist lodge on Mnemba Island, on conserving a “special area” around the island was being implemented. The 2025 fee revision left that special area on its old, higher rates: $25 per adult and $10 per child for visitors from outside East Africa.

The published description of the special area’s rules comes from &Beyond itself, so read it as the company’s account. Its December 2023 release describes a ring 400 to 700 meters around the island, with permits, a limit of eight boats a day carrying at most seven tourists and two crew, fixed access hours, and no anchors. A dive trip to “Mnemba” can mean the ring or the wider reef outside it, and the price should tell you which.

The reef outside the ring is being added to. The ministry reports 1,907 artificial reef units placed in conservation areas on both islands, including Uroa and Pongwe inside the Mnemba area and Muyuni and Kizimkazi Mkunguni in Menai Bay, built with the Wildlife Conservation Society, &Beyond and MCCC (Mwambao).

The ministry has also written guidance for Mnemba’s boats. In 2024/25 it drafted a guideline for tour guides and tourist boat captains on how to run dolphin trips inside the Mnemba area, briefed them on it, and put up 25 signboards about rare and endangered species across the conservation areas of both islands.

Kizimkazi’s dolphins in southern Zanzibar rest less when tour boats arrive

Kizimkazi, on the south coast, sits inside the Menai Bay Conservation Area, declared in August 1997. The IUCN task force on marine mammal habitats lists the bay as an Important Marine Mammal Area of 648 km², home to resident Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins and to the Indian Ocean humpback dolphin, which the Red List classes as Endangered.

A mark-recapture estimate from 2002 counted 63 humpback dolphins in the bay. The 2015 estimate was 19. Bottlenose dolphins went from 136 to 114 over the same period. The task force names bycatch in gillnets and “unregulated dolphin watching” as the pressures on them.

Two studies from Kizimkazi describe what the boats do. Stensland and Berggren followed nursing bottlenose females from January to March in 2000, 2001 and 2002. One or two tourist boats without swimmers did not change how the groups moved. As tourist activity grew, and when swimmers went in, the groups moved more erratically and the mothers traveled more, which the authors say may cut into the time available for nursing.

Christiansen and colleagues then compared groups with and without tourist boats present. With boats, the dolphins were less likely to stay resting or socializing and more likely to start traveling; resting, socializing and foraging all fell. Their conclusion was that regulation of dolphin tourism off the south coast was “urgently needed”.

The 2007 paper already urged that guidelines issued by the Zanzibar fisheries department be implemented and complied with. The one dolphin guideline the ministry reported writing in its 2025 and 2026 budget speeches covers the Mnemba area, not Menai Bay. If you go, the 2007 findings point to a boat that keeps its distance and puts no swimmers in the water.

Chumbe, Zanzibar’s first marine protected area, is run as a snorkeling reef

Chumbe Island lies between Menai Bay and the Changuu-Bawe islands, and its reef sanctuary and forest reserve were legally gazetted in 1994, which the park describes as the first marine protected area in Tanzania. It is managed by Chumbe Island Coral Park, a not-for-profit company, under a public-private partnership with the government, and says it has paid its own way since its eco-lodge opened in 1998.

What Chumbe offers visitors is guided snorkeling, tours of about an hour with the equipment provided, plus intertidal walks at spring low tide. Its activities page does not list scuba diving, and the reef crest is shallow enough that the park itself says snorkelers see what is usually only accessible to divers. Book it as a snorkel day, not a dive day.

The park’s own monitoring is the case for going. It reports more than 500 reef fish species and fish biomass rising from under 200 kg per hectare in the late 1990s to more than 2,300 kg per hectare by 2025, Those are the park’s figures for its own reef. Our snorkeling destinations list covers reefs built for the same kind of day.

The wrecks off Stone Town lie in Zanzibar’s Changuu-Bawe conservation area

The islands in front of Zanzibar’s old port, Changuu, Chapwani and Bawe, form their own conservation area, and the 2009 government guide says it holds at least three shipwrecks that the dive centers running daily trips can take you to. The best known is the Great Northern, a British cable-laying ship built in 1870 that sank on New Year’s Eve 1902 on a reef next to the Pange sandbank.

The same guide lists a wreck at 30 meters next to Bawe Island, a former Royal Navy lighter, and the Penguin, a steamship used to dredge the Stone Town port in the 1920s, at 40 meters between Pange and Murogo. Those are the guide’s depths; confirm them with the operator before booking.

In its May 2026 budget speech the ministry reported an ecological survey of Changuu, a new patrol station on Bawe Island and an ocean-sensor buoy moored inside the Changuu-Bawe area. Our wreck diving list covers other coasts built around this kind of dive.

Zanzibar’s Fisheries Act bans owning a spear gun, not just firing one

The law under all of this is the Fisheries Act No. 7 of 2010, passed by the House of Representatives on 31 March 2010. It repealed the Fisheries Act of 1988 and created a Marine Conservation Unit inside the fisheries department to coordinate the controlled areas. The ministry has since proposed repealing it and enacting a Fisheries Development and Marine Conservation Act (the Swahili title, translated); in May 2026 the next step was tabling that bill.

Section 17 is the one a diver should read. Subsection (1) says no person shall use a beach seine, fishing weir, spear gun or “any electrical or diving device for fishing”, which rules out hunting on scuba. Subsection (3) goes further: no person shall import, sell, offer for sale, possess, control or make a spear gun at all. Subsection (2) presumes that one found on a fishing vessel, or with anyone near Zanzibar’s waters, was meant for fishing.

Some spearfishing charters describe a sport license for Zanzibar waters. Section 17 contains no exception for sport, so any such license would have to rest on a separate regulation or exemption. Ask to see it in writing before you pack a gun; our spearfishing basics are written for places where the sport is plainly legal.

The government guide also asks divers not to remove, touch or stand on coral, or buy shells or other prohibited marine products.

Tides, not the monsoon, move most of the water in the Zanzibar Channel

Stone Town, Bawe and Chumbe all face the Zanzibar Channel, which a 2015 modeling study describes as about 100 km long, 40 km wide and 40 meters deep. Part of the East African Coastal Current flows north through it, strongest in the southwest monsoon season and weak, or occasionally reversed, in the northeast monsoon.

That seasonal flow is the smaller part of the story. The same study found that the tides carry 92 percent of the channel’s kinetic energy, against 5 percent for the ocean current and 3 percent for the local wind. The channel is well mixed except for short spells in the two rainy seasons, and it cools temporarily between December and February.

Oceanographers working on the Pemba Channel to the north use the same regional calendar: a southeast monsoon from May to September, cooler and drier with strong southerly winds, a northeast monsoon from November to March, and inter-monsoon months in April and October with relatively calm weather. On the channel side, check the tide table before the season.

Zanzibar’s $44 visitor insurance does not mention diving

Since 1 October 2024 every visitor to Zanzibar who is not a resident must hold an inbound travel policy from the Zanzibar Insurance Corporation. The corporation’s FAQ puts the price at $44 per visitor, covers a trip of up to 92 consecutive days, and says the policy must be issued by the corporation itself. Your own travel insurance does not replace it.

The policy is real cover: its FAQ lists emergency medical expenses and repatriation among the basic covers, alongside personal accident, baggage and liability. But neither the FAQ nor its list of exclusions mentions diving, scuba, depth or recompression treatment, in either direction. It neither promises to pay for a dive accident nor says it will refuse.

Treat it as the entry ticket, not dive cover. Carry a policy that names scuba and hyperbaric treatment; our dive insurance guide covers what to look for. Ask your operator where the nearest recompression chamber is and how a diver gets there, before you are in the water.

Pemba, the other Zanzibar island, is a separate dive trip

Pemba lies north of Unguja across its own channel, and it is not a day trip. Its reefs sit in the Pemba Channel Conservation Area, which appears on the same 2025 fee list, and the ministry has completed the procedures for two new conservation areas on Pemba’s east coast. Fewer visitors make the crossing: Pemba’s visitor-fee line collected TZS 46 million from July 2024 to March 2025, 15 percent of its estimate, and the ministry noted that most visitors go to the conservation areas on Unguja.

The water there behaves differently. A study of 24 years of drifter data found higher median surface currents in the Pemba Channel during the southeast monsoon than in the other seasons, with the fastest water over depths beyond 200 meters. The insurance rule travels with you: the corporation’s portal lists Pemba Airport, Mkoani and Wete among its entry points.

Coral monitoring at Misali and the other Pemba Channel sites, as at Menai Bay and Tumbatu, found corals beginning to recover after bleaching, the ministry reported in 2026. The operators counted below are all on Unguja.

Four SSI dive centers among Zanzibar’s 13 listed watersports businesses

The Zanzibar operator list holds 13 watersports businesses on Unguja, read on 24 September 2026. Four are dive centers, and SSI publishes all four in its register of affiliated centers: Bawe Diving Center, Dive Horizons Zanzibar, which SSI files under Kizimkazi, One Ocean Zanzibar and Scuba Blue Zanzibar.

The other nine are kite schools, seven of them published by IKO, around Paje, Jambiani and Kiwengwa; the Paje guide covers that side of the island. A register listing says a body lists the business on that date. It says nothing about the boats, the teaching or whether the center is open this season.

The license that matters locally comes from the Zanzibar Commission for Tourism, which inspected 690 tourism businesses across Unguja and Pemba in 2025/26, water-sports operators among them, for compliance with the Tourism Act. Ask a dive center for its current license. Which registers can be read sets out what each source returns.