The Outspan Hotel, located in

Nyeri Nyeri is a town situated in the Central Highlands of Kenya. It is the county headquarters of Nyeri County and was the central administrative headquarters of the country's former Central Province (Kenya), Central Province. The town is situated a ...

Kenya Kenya, officially the Republic of Kenya, is a country located in East Africa. With an estimated population of more than 52.4 million as of mid-2024, Kenya is the 27th-most-populous country in the world and the 7th most populous in Africa. ...

, was developed from an old farm by

Eric Sherbrooke Walker Major Eric George Sherbrooke Walker, MC (1887–1976) was a hotelier and founder of the Outspan Hotel and Treetops Hotel in Kenya, as well as a decorated military officer. He is remembered as the host of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip ...

during the 1920s. In 1928, Walker opened the Outspan Hotel on of

Crown Land Crown land, also known as royal domain, is a territorial area belonging to the monarch, who personifies the Crown. It is the equivalent of an entailed estate and passes with the monarchy, being inseparable from it. Today, in Commonwealth realm ...

in Nyeri, overlooking the

gorge A canyon (; archaic British English spelling: ''cañon''), gorge or chasm, is a deep cleft between escarpments or cliffs resulting from weathering and the erosion, erosive activity of a river over geologic time scales. Rivers have a natural tend ...

of a river in the

Aberdare Range The Aberdare Range (formerly the Sattima Range, Kikuyu: ''Nyandarua'') is a long mountain range of upland, north of Kenya's capital Nairobi with an average elevation of . It straddles the counties of Nyandarua, Nyeri, Murang'a, Kiambu and ...

. The hotel now features 45 rooms on of landscaped gardens.

Background

In 1939,

Baden-Powell Lieutenant-General Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, ( ; 22 February 1857 – 8 January 1941) was a British Army officer, writer, founder of The Boy Scouts Association and its first Chief Scout, and founder, with ...

and his wife Olave moved into a cottage he had commissioned on the hotel grounds. The Paxtu cottage is now part of the hotel complex and serves as a small Scouting museum dedicated to scouting. The hunter

Jim Corbett Edward James Corbett (25 July 1875 – 19 April 1955) was an Anglo-Indian hunter and author. He gained fame through hunting and killing several man-eating tigers and leopards in Northern India, as detailed in his bestselling 1944 memoir '' M ...

also lived there.

References

{{reflist Hotels in Kenya Hotels established in 1928 Hotel buildings completed in 1928

Background

See also

References