Where Rhodesia
still is.

The grid-laid centre of modern Harare is substantially the centre of colonial-era Salisbury. The Pioneer Column raised the Union Jack on the 13th of September 1890 at what is now Africa Unity Square. The buildings that line the surrounding streets — the Parliament Building (formerly the Standard Bank Chambers, repurposed in 1980), the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (a 1990s tower on the site of the colonial Reserve Bank), the older banks on Samora Machel Avenue, and the older hotels — are all early-twentieth-century. The National Gallery on Julius Nyerere Way and the National Archives on Borrowdale Road both have substantial Rhodesia-era collections.

Founded in 1894 on the burned site of Lobengula's capital and named after his royal kraal, Bulawayo was the country's principal industrial centre throughout the colonial period and the political centre of the Ndebele people and (later) of ZAPU. The city has a fine Edwardian grid of broad streets ("wide enough to turn a wagon and a team of sixteen oxen", as the founders specified), a substantial railway museum at the National Railway Museum, and the small Bulawayo Centenary Park. The post-independence history of the city was particularly difficult — the Gukurahundi atrocities of the early 1980s occurred substantially in its surrounding districts, and the population has been historically under-served by central government since.

The granite kopjes south of Bulawayo where, in 1896, Rhodes negotiated the end of the Second Matabele War with the Ndebele indunas, and where he himself was buried in 1902 at his own request on a high granite rock he called "View of the World". The grave is simple — a bronze plaque set into the rock, his name and dates and nothing else — and the surrounding park is a UNESCO-listed cultural landscape with substantial San rock-art galleries (the Nswatugi cave is the most accessible). The political question of whether Rhodes's grave should remain in place has been periodically debated in Zimbabwe since 1980; as of writing, the grave is still there and openly accessible to visitors.

The medieval Shona stone city near modern Masvingo, occupied from roughly 1100 to 1500, was the capital of the kingdom that gave the modern country its name. The site contains the largest pre-colonial stone structures in sub-Saharan Africa: the Hill Complex, the Great Enclosure (the largest single ancient structure south of the Sahara), and the Valley Ruins. The carved soapstone bird sculptures found here — eight in total, of which seven survive — are the source of the bird-image on the Zimbabwean flag. The colonial-era controversy over the site's origins (white Rhodesians for most of the twentieth century resisted the obvious archaeological conclusion that the city was African-built, on racial-political grounds; by 1973 the Rhodesian government had formally banned the publication of any archaeological work attributing the city to its actual builders) makes a visit to Great Zimbabwe an essential corrective to any colonial-era reading of the country.

The waterfall on the Zambezi at the Zimbabwean-Zambian border, "discovered" by David Livingstone in November 1855 and named for Queen Victoria. (Its older name in the local Lozi language is Mosi-oa-Tunya, "the smoke that thunders".) The Rhodesian state developed the Zimbabwean side as a tourist destination from the 1900s onward; the colonial Victoria Falls Hotel of 1904 is still operating and is one of the most atmospheric old colonial hotels in southern Africa. The Falls themselves are best viewed from the Zimbabwean side; the Zambian side has more activity-oriented infrastructure (bungee jumping, rafting). The Victoria Falls Bridge, opened in 1905, is one of the few completed sections of Rhodes's Cape-to-Cairo dream.

The town of Mutare (formerly Umtali) is the gateway to the Eastern Highlands — the long mountain range along the Mozambican border that produced both the country's coffee and its tea, and that served as a substantial sector of the bush war's eastern front. The highlands cool from the Zimbabwean highveld plateau (avg 1,400 m) to the mountains around Inyangani (2,592 m, Zimbabwe's highest point). The Nyanga district was substantially Cecil Rhodes's personal estate — his cottage, now a museum, is at Rhodes Inyanga National Park. The Vumba Mountains south of Mutare contain the Bunga Forest, a small intact patch of Afromontane forest with exceptional birdlife.

The double-curvature concrete arch dam across the Zambezi, completed in 1959 as the federation's largest infrastructure project. At completion it was the largest hydroelectric dam in the world by reservoir volume (5,400 km³); Lake Kariba behind it is the second-largest artificial lake by volume worldwide and the fourth-largest by surface area. The construction process — involving the relocation of about 57,000 Tonga people from the flooded valley and a notable Operation Noah to rescue the trapped wildlife — was a substantial political controversy in its time. The dam itself, viewed from the Kariba Heights, gives the best technical sense of mid-twentieth-century imperial engineering.

The country's largest national park (14,651 km²), established 1928, in the Kalahari sandveld of western Zimbabwe. Hwange holds one of the largest elephant populations in Africa (about 40,000 in the 2014 aerial census) and is one of the more accessible parks in southern Africa for self-drive safaris. The colonial-era hunting camps and rest-houses are still in use; the Main Camp is a substantial Rhodesian-era settlement on the eastern edge of the park. The lion population is famous, particularly after the 2015 killing of the radio-collared male lion Cecil at the park boundary — a notable international incident that briefly forced Zimbabwe's hunting policies into international news.

A UNESCO-listed national park on the Zambezi between Kariba and the Mozambican border, in the deep Zambezi valley below the highveld escarpment. Mana Pools is famous for canoe safaris on the Zambezi itself — possible at low water from June to October — and for the unusual permission to walk unaccompanied in the bush, available with a guide and at certain times of year. The campsites are basic. The wildlife (elephant, hippo, crocodile, leopard, and a small population of wild dog) is exceptional. The river crossings into Zambian Lower Zambezi National Park on the opposite bank are seasonal but possible.

The small midlands town where Ian Smith was born in 1919 and where he ran a tobacco farm before and after his political career. His Gwenoro farm is still owned by the Smith family (Smith returned to it after losing the 1980 election, and lived there until his health forced a move to South Africa in 2005; he died at Cape Town in 2007). The town itself is unremarkable — a small midlands trading post — but the surrounding Ngezi-Chrome district shows the rural settler-economy that produced Smith's politics. Selukwe was renamed Shurugwi in 1982. The Smith family graves are at the local Anglican church.