About Eritrea

A Nation Forged in Struggle

Eritrea became an independent nation on 24 May 1993 — officially the youngest country in Africa at the time — after one of the continent's longest and most brutal liberation wars. The thirty-year conflict against Ethiopian rule began in 1961 and did not end until 1991, when Eritrean forces captured the capital Asmara. A UN-supervised referendum in 1993 returned a 99.8% vote for independence, and the Eritrean state was formally established with Isaias Afwerki as its first president.

The price of independence was extraordinary. Estimates place the war dead at 65,000 on the Eritrean side alone, with several times that figure displaced or living as refugees. The country that emerged from conflict in 1993 possessed one of the highest per-capita land mine densities in the world and an infrastructure shattered by three decades of war. Reconstruction proceeded slowly, hampered by a border war with Ethiopia that resumed between 1998 and 2000 and killed a further 80,000 people on both sides.

Today Eritrea remains one of the most closed countries in the world to outside visitors, governed under a system of indefinite national service that has driven large-scale emigration. Yet within its borders Eritrea preserves a physical and cultural landscape of remarkable originality — one largely untouched by the mass tourism that has transformed much of East Africa.

Asmara: The Art Deco Capital

The capital Asmara, perched at 2,325 metres above sea level on the Eritrean Plateau, is one of the most unusual cities in Africa. Under Italian colonial rule from 1890 to 1941, Asmara was reimagined as a showcase of modernist architecture — a laboratory for Futurist, Rationalist, Expressionist and Art Deco design that the Italians found too experimental to build at home. The result is a city centre so architecturally coherent that UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 2017.

The Fiat Tagliero building — a concrete aircraft hangar balanced on two slender fins without visible support columns — is Asmara's most photographed landmark and one of the most audacious pieces of Futurist architecture anywhere in the world. The Cinema Impero, Cinema Roma, the covered market building and dozens of rationalist apartment blocks survive in varying states of preservation, their facades bleached by the highland sun to muted ochres and creams.

Asmara's urban culture reflects this layered history: Italian-style espresso bars serving macchiato to elderly men in pressed suits, Orthodox churches holding Ge'ez liturgy beside Italian Catholic cathedrals, and a night-time temperature cool enough for the outdoor café culture that Italians implanted here in the 1930s and that never left.

Massawa: The Pearl of the Red Sea

From Asmara, the road descends 2,000 metres in 65 kilometres to the coastal city of Massawa — a drop in altitude so rapid that the climate shifts from highland cool to humid tropical heat within an hour's drive. Massawa is Eritrea's principal port and the gateway to the Dahlak Archipelago.

The old city of Massawa, built on an island connected to the mainland by a causeway, preserves a remarkable collection of Ottoman-era architecture: multi-storey coral-stone buildings with carved wooden balconies, merchant houses with their coral window screens intact, and a waterfront mosque that dates to the sixteenth century. Much of the old city was damaged in the final assault of the independence war in 1990, and reconstruction has been partial and slow. The ruins and the restored buildings coexist in a way that gives the city an atmosphere of ghostly beauty.

For divers, Massawa is the embarkation point. The port's own waters contain the wrecks of vessels sunk during the Second World War and the independence conflict, and the town's small dive operations can arrange excursions to the outer Dahlak reefs for groups prepared to navigate Eritrea's bureaucratic permit system.