The white waterfront palace next door to the House of Wonders was the official residence of the Sultans of Zanzibar from the 1890s until the 1964 revolution. It is now the Palace Museum, and the rooms are kept much as the last sultan left them — heavy Omani furniture, photographs of state visits, and the personal belongings of Princess Salme, the nineteenth-century Zanzibari princess who eloped with a German merchant and wrote a remarkable memoir from exile in Berlin.
The collection is small and dustily presented but worth the modest entry fee. The upstairs balconies look out over the harbour at the dhows. Combined tickets sometimes include access to the nearby Old Dispensary; ask at the door.