Eritrea

Eritrea has one of the most extraordinary and least visited capital cities in the world. Asmara sits at 2,325 m on a highland plateau and contains the best-preserved concentration of Italian modernist architecture anywhere on Earth — several hundred rationalist, futurist and Art Deco buildings put up between 1935 and 1941 and then left almost untouched by seventy years of poverty and war. UNESCO inscribed the whole city in 2017.

Below the escarpment, two hours and 2,300 vertical metres down, is Massawa — a coral-stone Ottoman and Egyptian port on the Red Sea, half ruined by the war, and one of the hottest inhabited places on the continent. Offshore, the Dahlak archipelago has over two hundred islands and coral reefs that essentially nobody dives. Inland there are pre-Aksumite ruins on a plateau at Qohaito, a Monday camel market at Keren, and a cloud forest called Filfil clinging to the escarpment in an otherwise dry country.

It is also one of the hardest countries in the world to visit, and the reasons are political. Eritrea has had no elections since independence in 1993, a constitution ratified in 1997 and never implemented, an open-ended national service that the UN has described as possibly amounting to enslavement, and a press freedom ranking that has repeatedly placed it last in the world — below North Korea. Travel outside the capital requires a permit applied for in person and often refused.

This page treats that as the main content rather than as an afterthought, because you cannot plan a trip here without it. For the traveller who wants a city unlike any other and is prepared for the bureaucracy, Eritrea is one of the most rewarding places in Africa. For anyone else it is a hard sell, and honestly so.

The name is Italian and it is Greek. When Italy consolidated its Red Sea holdings into a single colony in 1890, it called them Colonia Eritrea, from the Greek Erythra Thalassa — the Red Sea. There was no polity of that name before; the colony created the borders, and thirty years of war created the nation inside them.

Three countries in one, stacked vertically. A central highland plateau at 1,800–2,500 m where most Eritreans live and where the climate is mild all year; a narrow, blisteringly hot coastal plain along 1,150 km of Red Sea; and western lowlands sloping towards Sudan. The escarpment between the first two drops 2,300 m in about 100 km.

Asmara is in the middle of the highlands; Massawa is 115 km away and 2,300 m below it. Keren is 90 km north-west. Almost every road journey in Eritrea is either along the plateau or down the escarpment, and the escarpment road is one of the great drives in Africa.

The highlands were part of the Aksumite empire, one of the great powers of the ancient world, whose Red Sea port at Adulis connected Rome and India. Pre-Aksumite sites at Qohaito and Metera date from the first millennium BCE. Christianity arrived in the fourth century, early enough that the Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox churches are among the oldest in the world; Islam arrived within the Prophet's lifetime, when followers fleeing Mecca crossed the Red Sea.

Ottoman, Egyptian and local powers contested the coast for centuries — Massawa's coral-stone architecture is the physical record of it. Then in 1890 Italy consolidated its holdings into the Colony of Eritrea, and used it as the base for the invasion of Ethiopia that ended in humiliating defeat at Adwa in 1896 and, forty years later, in Mussolini's conquest of 1935–36.

It was that second campaign that built the Asmara you see. Italy poured money and architects into the colonial capital between 1935 and 1941, at exactly the moment when rationalism, futurism and Art Deco were at their most confident, and with no planning committee to say no. By 1939 Asmara had a population that was around a third Italian, a cinema for every few thousand people, and more traffic lights than Rome.

Britain took Eritrea in 1941 and administered it for eleven years, dismantling and selling off a good deal of the industrial plant. In 1952 the UN federated Eritrea with Ethiopia, against significant Eritrean opposition. In 1962 Haile Selassie dissolved the federation and annexed the territory outright. The war had already started the year before.

The Eritrean war of independence ran from 1961 to 1991 — thirty years, one of the longest in African history. It was fought first by the ELF and then, decisively, by the EPLF, against an Ethiopian state that after 1974 was armed by the Soviet Union and fielded one of the largest armies in Africa.

Isaias Afwerki led the EPLF from 1987, became president when Eritrea became independent in 1993, and has held the office ever since. Eritrea has never held a national election. The constitution ratified in 1997 was never implemented. The National Assembly has not met since 2002.

This is the single most important thing to understand about contemporary Eritrea, and the reason so many Eritreans are not in it. National service was introduced in 1995 as eighteen months — six months of military training at Sawa and twelve months of deployment. Since the 2002 Warsai-Yikealo Development Campaign, it has been open-ended.

Reporters Without Borders has repeatedly ranked Eritrea last in the world for press freedom — in several years placing it below North Korea. There has been no independent domestic media since the September 2001 closures, and the state broadcaster and Hadas Ertra are the only outlets.

A city of around 800,000 at 2,325 m, laid out in avenues of palms and jacaranda, with a climate that hovers between 15 and 25 °C every month of the year and a pace that is genuinely unhurried. It is also — by common agreement among people who have been to a lot of African capitals — the safest and most pleasant to walk in.

In 2017 UNESCO inscribed the whole of central Asmara as "Asmara: A Modernist African City" — the first modernist city and one of the first African urban ensembles on the list. What survives is roughly 400 buildings from 1935–41, when Italy was building a colonial capital at speed with the most experimental architects of the period and no conservative planning authority to restrain them.

The Italians built a 950 mm narrow-gauge railway from Massawa to Asmara between 1887 and 1911, later extended to Bishia — climbing 2,300 m through 30 tunnels and 65 bridges in 117 km. It is one of the great feats of colonial engineering and it still runs.

Down the escarpment from Asmara — 115 km and 2,300 m of descent, from 18 °C to 40 °C in three hours — lies Massawa, the old Red Sea port the Ottomans, the Egyptians, the Italians and the British each held in turn. It is one of the hottest inhabited places on earth in summer, and it is architecturally unlike anywhere else in the country.

Off Massawa lie around 200 islands, of which four are permanently inhabited. The Dahlak are low, arid and largely uninhabited, ringed by reefs that were effectively closed to the world for the thirty years of the war and have had almost no diving pressure since.

Keren, 91 km north-west of Asmara at 1,390 m, is Eritrea's second city and its most Muslim — a Tigre and Bilen town of flat-roofed houses, mosques and one of the great market days in the Horn of Africa.

Eritrea's archaeology is under-excavated and largely unvisited, and it is old — the Dahlak-to-highlands corridor carried Red Sea trade for two and a half thousand years, and the pre-Aksumite and Aksumite worlds are on both sides of the modern border.

The eastern escarpment between Asmara and the coast catches enough moisture off the Red Sea to hold a band of tropical cloud forest — Filfil Solomuna, the last significant remnant of a forest that once covered much of the highlands.

The Italians brought bicycle racing with them and it never left. Eritrea is, per head, the strongest cycling nation in Africa — the Tour of Eritrea has run since the 1940s, and the country has put riders in the Tour de France.

Eritrea recognises nine ethnolinguistic groups, and the state has been unusually consistent about treating them as equal — no official language, all nine taught at primary level, all nine on the banknotes. The population is also split roughly half Christian and half Muslim, broadly highland versus lowland, and this has been managed better here than almost anywhere comparable.

There is no official language in Eritrea, which is a deliberate policy rather than an oversight. In practice Tigrinya, Arabic and English are the working languages — Tigrinya for daily life, Arabic for the lowlands and the coast, English for secondary and higher education and for most signage you will need.

Two cuisines share a table here: the highland Horn-of-Africa tradition of injera and spiced stews, and a genuinely surviving Italian one. Asmara restaurants serve lasagne and cotoletta without irony, and pasta has been Eritrean food for three generations.

The essentials

Bun — the coffee ceremony — is not a performance for tourists. It is the ordinary way a household receives a guest, and it takes an hour or more. If you are invited, accept, and clear your afternoon.

Alcohol is legal, available and unremarkable — one of the practical differences between Eritrea and its neighbours across the Red Sea. There is a domestic brewery, a domestic distillery, and a honey wine with a very long history.

The calendar runs on three systems at once — the Ge'ez calendar of the Orthodox church (thirteen months, seven or eight years behind the Gregorian), the Islamic lunar calendar, and the Gregorian one for the state. All three are visible in the same year.

Eritrea has three climates stacked on top of each other, and the difference between them is the altitude. Asmara at 2,325 m is temperate all year; Massawa at sea level, 115 km away, is one of the hottest places on the planet. October to March is the season for both.

Asmara International (ASM) is the only functioning international airport, and the route map is thin and changes without much notice. Check current schedules directly with the airlines rather than relying on aggregator sites, which handle Eritrea poorly.

There are no direct flights from anywhere in Europe. From Prague or Vienna the realistic routings are one stop in Cairo, Dubai or Istanbul, with total journey times of roughly 12 to 20 hours depending on the connection.

This is the part that stops most trips. Almost every nationality — Czech, Slovak, and all EU passports included — needs a visa obtained in advance. There is no visa on arrival and no e-visa. And once you are in, you need a separate permit for every journey outside Asmara.

The currency is the nakfa (ERN), named after the mountain town that was the EPLF's wartime capital, and it is pegged to the dollar at a fixed official rate. Eritrea is a cash-only country for a visitor, and the mechanics are stricter than anywhere you have likely been.

The honest summary is that Eritrea is physically very safe and politically very constrained. Violent crime against visitors is rare to the point of being remarkable, and Asmara is a city where walking alone at night is genuinely unremarkable. The risks here are of a different kind.

A trip here is not improvised. Almost everyone arrives on an itinerary arranged in advance with a licensed local operator, because that is what the visa application effectively requires and because the permit system makes independent movement outside Asmara impossible in practice.

Eritrea is not the cheap country its GDP per head suggests, because the nakfa is pegged rather than traded and the tourism infrastructure is small enough to price accordingly. Day-to-day life is very cheap; the trip itself is not.

Eritrea in ten frames — the modernist capital, the coral port, the reef, the market, the plateau and the forest.

Harnet Avenue, Asmara

The spine of the World Heritage district, and the route of the evening passeggiata.

Italian church architecture

The Lombard-Romanesque idiom the colonial period brought to the highlands — brick, round arches, rose window.

Massawa waterfront

Fishing boats below the coral-block buildings of the old town, much of it still war-damaged.

The Dahlak reefs

Around 200 islands off Massawa, closed to the world for thirty years and barely dived since.

Camel market

Keren's Monday market draws sellers from the Barka lowlands and the Sudanese border country.

The coffee ceremony

Three rounds, an hour or more, and the ordinary way an Eritrean household receives a guest.

Injera and stews

One plate, no cutlery, eaten with the right hand. The bread is the plate.

Qohaito

A pre-Aksumite city at 2,700 m, still largely unexcavated and entirely unsignposted.

Rashaida dress

The embroidered burqa of the Rashaida, the most recent of Eritrea's nine peoples to arrive.

Filfil Solomuna

The last significant tropical cloud forest in the country, held up by mist off the Red Sea.

Eritrea is the most unexpected country I know. You arrive braced for a hard place — the press-freedom ranking, the conscription, the closed borders — and you walk out of your hotel into a palm-lined avenue full of people strolling in the evening cool, past Art Deco cinemas and 1930s espresso machines, in what may honestly be the safest capital city in Africa. Both things are true at once, and holding both of them is the whole experience.

What is worth coming for: Asmara itself, which is unlike any other city on the continent and which survived because nobody could afford to knock it down. The descent to Massawa. The reefs nobody has been diving. The Monday market at Keren. The coffee ceremony in someone's front room, which will take your whole afternoon and should.

What to be honest about: this is a country a great many of its own young people are trying to leave, and the reason is a national service with no end date. You will not hear that from anyone you meet, and you should not ask them for it. The generosity you are shown is real and it is not an argument about anything. Take the photography rules and the permits seriously — they are the difference between a good trip and an incident, and the person who pays for your carelessness may not be you.

Go with a good local operator, bring all your money in cash, expect to be offline, and give the place two weeks if you can. It rewards patience in a way very few countries still do.

— Radim Kaufmann