The natives call it “Nyari”, a giriama word that means “the place crumbling naturally by itself”.
Marafa village is in Magarini district, just forty kilometres down Malindi area, less than one hour drive, mostly on a new tarmac road studded by baobabs and mangoes.
The depression is not far from the trade center, schools and government offices.
To the other side, “Nyari” meets the biodiversity-rich dakatcha woodlands, a forest able to store water, protect the soil, shelter unique animals and plants and provide environmental services and direct benefits to the local people.
If every forest in the dry lands of the coast is sacred, here Marafa has is deep temple. Lots of medicine men frequented its ever-expanding base to source for natural herbs and other plants of curative value.
Before tho became a giriama community fenced place, with a ticket fee and a bar restaurant built by an Italian NGO, the kaleidoscopic canyon was a dreaming playground for the children of this area, hiding and making their homes after school, creating stories, fears and games.
“We deal with it since we born – says Julius, the community expert guide – we know from our grandparents and we’ve grown up with ancestors stories about magic and evil, good weather ceremonies and dances to have fertility and rain from the sky.
But the name “Hell’s kitchen” is not because of “mchawi” (evil witchcrafts), it’s because of the day heat in the middle of the canyons, where sun can hit 50 degrees”.
Now Marafa Hell’s Kitchen is one of the most underrated sites on the Kenyan Coast, attracting thousands of tourist every year on a daily tour which often includes the golden sands of Che Chale or the mangrove environment of Robinson Island and Ngomeni saline landscape.
The geological formation was caused by erosion of the sandstone escarpment, revealing a unique set of vibrantly coloured rock layers, from whites to pinks, from rusty yellows to oranges, from reddy-browns to deep crimsons.
Marafa Hell’s Kitchen features an array of jagged gorges and tall chimneys, some of them rising up to 30 meters high, skinny spines of rocks in warm hues stretches out across the horizon and changes colors as the sun walks in the sky above.
They are changing shapes and colors in every season, worn by wind, rain and floods, this year for example between the gorges of the sandstone ridge we found the face of an huge indian chief spontaneously carved in one of the biggest rocks. 
The layer-cake colors of the sandstone reveal whites, pinks, oranges, and deep crimsons, making the gorge particularly striking at sundown, when tones of the ribbed sandstone gullies are highlighted and mirrored by those of the setting sun.
Since many years, there’s a funny small community of baboons living around there, coming to the depression when the trees bring fruits, and enjoy to eat them on top of the chimneys, creating one of the most exciting African moments and views.
According to a local legend, the deep chasms of Hell’s Kitchen were formed by divine wrath. There was once a rich and extravagant family who lived at Marafa, who indulged in bathing in valuable milk from their cows.
God, furious at their excessive behaviour, punished them by opening the ground beneath their home. The symbolically milky white and blood red sandstone of Hell’s Kitchen serves as a reminder against wastefulness and exorbitance.
There’s another giriama legend narrating about a miracle happened one day: all village inhabitants received a vision, the ancestors were telling them this miracle was coming and they had to leave their town. Everyone moved except an old woman who refused to leave.
The abandoned town then supposedly vanished, with the remaining woman still inside, leaving the Nyari in its place.
Geological history, obviously, tells a slightly more mundane story for the striking rock formations.
Any ridge existed which was mix of hard and soft rocks.
Over the years, the crumbly, sandstone rocks have eroded under the forces of wind and rain, leaving the jagged outcrops of hard rock.
This process is expanding the “Nyari” even today, with the wooden fence of the view point having to be moved three times in the last years as the previous one succumbs to erosion.