Gede Ruins

The ruins of Gedi are a UNESCO World Heritage site near the Indian Ocean coast of eastern Kenya. The site is adjacent to the town of Gedi in the Kilifi District and within the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest.

Gedi is one of many medieval Swahili coastal settlements that stretch from Barawa, Somalia to the Zambezi River in Mozambique. There are 116 known Swahili sites stretching from southern Somalia to Vumba Kuu at the Kenya-Tanzania border. Since the rediscovery of the Gedi ruins by colonialists in the 1920s, Gedi has been one of the most intensely excavated and studied of those sites, along with Shanga, Manda, Ungwana, Kilwa, and the Comoros.