Discover Karachi

The story of Karachi begins with Baloch fishermen who settled this natural harbor, calling their village Kolachi. The area was known to the ancient Greeks—Alexander the Great’s admiral Nearchus sailed past the island they called Morontobara, today’s Manora, on his voyage from the Indus to Babylonia in 326 BCE. In 1729, Kolachi became a fortified trading settlement under the Kalhora dynasty; by the 1790s, the Talpur rulers had built a fort on Manora Island to protect commerce with Oman and Bahrain. But Karachi’s transformation began on 1 February 1839 when HMS Wellesley anchored off Manora and the garrison surrendered without firing a shot, handing the British a port they would develop into the gateway to the Indus River valley.

By 1914, Karachi had become the largest grain-exporting port of the entire British Empire. The city’s population exploded after Pakistan’s independence in 1947, when it served as the new nation’s first capital. Hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from India, known as Muhajirs, reshaped the city’s demographics and culture—their culinary traditions still define Burns Road and Tariq Road food streets today. Karachi lost its capital status when Islamabad was designated in 1960, but it never lost its economic primacy. Today the city is home to over 20 million people from every ethnic group in Pakistan, generating 25% of the national GDP and handling 95% of the country’s foreign trade through its two major ports.