The only capital in the world with a national park inside it
East Africa's biggest city, where you can see lions and giraffes against a skyline of office towers — Nairobi National Park sits just minutes from downtown, a quirk no other capital on Earth shares. Nyama choma, grilled meat shared communally, is the city's defining food ritual.
Nairobi began in 1899 as a rail depot for the Uganda Railway, chosen mainly because it had a reliable water supply — within a few decades it grew into British East Africa's colonial administrative capital, then independent Kenya's capital in 1963. Its name comes from a Maasai phrase meaning "place of cool waters."