You land at Asmara, and for most visitors the capital is the trip rather than the gateway to it. Give it three days: the modernist streets around Harnet Avenue, the Fiat Tagliero station, Cinema Impero, the covered market, the cathedral and the mosque within a few blocks of each other, and one long morning of doing nothing on a terrace with a macchiato. The country beyond it opens on a permit, applied for in advance in Asmara, and in practice the reliably granted circuit is three places. Massawa, down the escarpment on the Red Sea, is the second stop and the most different: coral-block Ottoman and Egyptian streets, Italian arcades, war damage nobody has hidden, and the boats to the Dahlak Archipelago, where the reef sees almost no divers. Keren, north west and back up at altitude, is worth timing for a Monday, when the camel market trades from early morning. South of the capital, the road through Dekemhare and Adi Keyh reaches the Aksumite ruins at Qohaito and the stele at Metera near Senafe, and it is the drive that shows you the highland farming country. Seven days covers Asmara, Massawa and Keren without hurrying. Ten adds the southern archaeology or a few nights on the islands. Assab and the Dankalia desert in the far south east are a serious undertaking rather than an extension, and every land border is closed to casual travel.
1 Eritrea city guide
Fun fact
The railway between Massawa and Asmara climbs from the Red Sea to the edge of the plateau, a rise of more than 2,300 metres, in about 118 kilometres of 950 mm narrow gauge. Italy built it between 1887 and 1932, the line was dismantled during the Second World War, and Eritrean crews rebuilt it in the 1990s largely by hand, using veterans who had worked on it before independence. It runs today on 1930s Ansaldo Mallet steam locomotives and Littorina railcars, which makes it less a transport link than a working museum on a gradient.
Stereotypes, sorted out
The realityThey share a script, a kitchen and thirty years of history nobody enjoyed, and they are not the same place to travel. Eritrea was Italian from the 1890s, which is why Asmara is a modernist city and why a macchiato and a plate of pasta are ordinary lunch. It has 1,200 kilometres of Red Sea coast, which Ethiopia has none of. It is roughly half Muslim and half Christian, and it is a tenth of the size, which is the practical difference: you can see a meaningful part of the country in a week.
The realityIt is difficult, not closed. Visas are issued, tour operators run, flights land in Asmara, and the permitted circuit of Asmara, Keren, Massawa and the Dahlak islands is a genuinely good week. What is true is that nothing here is spontaneous. The visa is arranged from abroad, the internal permits are applied for days ahead, and the money is brought in cash. Travellers who plan get in; travellers who improvise do not.
The realityIt is a working capital that happens to hold roughly 400 preserved modernist buildings. People queue in the cinemas, drink in the bars, and hold weddings in the buildings that guidebooks photograph. UNESCO inscribed it in 2017 for exactly that reason: the urbanism is intact and still in use, rather than restored for visitors. It is also a genuinely uncomfortable heritage, built by an occupying power with a segregation plan, and the city does not pretend otherwise.
The realityThe escarpment road alone answers that. Massawa is Ottoman, Egyptian and Italian architecture on coral islands, with an archipelago of barely-dived reef offshore. Qohaito and Metera are Aksumite-era sites on the southern plateau. Semenawi Bahri holds cloud forest and leopard between roughly 900 and 2,400 metres. Keren's Monday camel market is one of the great markets in the Horn. The constraint is the permit system, not the shortage of things worth the drive.
The realityIt is structural. The railway, the escarpment road, the coffee culture, the bread, the pasta on almost every menu and the language older Asmarinos slip into are all still in daily use, ninety years on. Asmara's modernist buildings were not preserved out of affection: the country was too poor and then too preoccupied to knock them down, and by the time anyone had the money they were worth keeping. That is a more complicated story than nostalgia, and it is the one the city tells.
How to get it right
- Accept the coffee. The ceremony runs to three rounds and an hour, the last of them a blessing, and leaving after the first is a small insult. Popcorn or roasted barley usually comes with it.
- Eat with your right hand, off the shared injera, and take from the section in front of you. Feeding a mouthful to someone else at the table is affection, not a joke.
- Dress conservatively, especially in Keren, Massawa and the lowlands. Shoulders and knees covered in any church or mosque, and shoes off at the door.
- Do not photograph soldiers, police, government buildings, bridges, the port or the airport. Ask before photographing anyone. This is the rule visitors break most often and the one with real consequences.
- Greetings are unhurried. A handshake, a shoulder touch and a run of questions about family come before business, and cutting to the point reads as rude.
- Politics is not small talk. National service, the border and the government are live subjects with consequences for the person answering, not for you. Let Eritreans raise them if they want to.
- Timekeeping is relaxed and hospitality is not. An invitation home is meant, arriving with something small is right, and refusing food outright lands badly.
Famous Eritrean faces
Biniam Girmay
Zersenay Tadese
Abraham Afewerki
Ghirmay Ghebreslassie
Daniel Teklehaimanot
Bereket Mengisteab
Helen Meles
Nipsey Hussle
Alemseged Tesfai
Sulaiman Addonia
Dawit Isaak
Ficre Ghebreyesus
Tiffany Haddish
Must-try Eritrean food
Zigni
The national dish: beef simmered for hours with berbere, tomato and red onion, and eaten with the fingers straight off the injera.
Tsebhi dorho
Chicken stew, deep red with berbere and finished with a hard-boiled egg. The dish for guests, holidays and anything worth marking.
Tihlo
Roasted barley dough rolled into balls and dipped in a spiced meat sauce with a small wooden fork. A highland speciality, and unlike anything else on the table.
Shiro
Ground chickpeas or broad beans stewed with garlic, ginger, onion and chilli. The everyday plate, and the vegan one you can rely on any day of the week.
Alicha
The mild half of the kitchen: turmeric instead of berbere, usually beef or vegetables, and the thing to order if the chilli is winning.
Hilbet
Fava beans, lentils and fenugreek ground, cooked and whipped to a cream, with a chilli sauce in the middle. Eaten with injera or kitcha.
Shahan ful
Stewed fava beans with oil, onion, tomato and chilli, out of a shared bowl with bread. Breakfast, and the cheapest good meal in the country.
Injera
Sour fermented teff flatbread. It is the plate, the cutlery and the base for everything above, and the fermentation is what gives it the tang.
Kitcha fit-fit
Unleavened kitcha torn up and tossed with spiced butter and berbere, often with a spoon of yoghurt on top. The other breakfast.
Himbasha
Lightly sweet celebration bread, scored into wedges before baking, with cardamom, sesame and raisins. Baked for holidays and given away.
Spaghetti with zigni
Not a fusion novelty but a ninety-year-old Eritrean staple: pasta under a berbere-hot meat sauce, on menus from Asmara diners to home kitchens.
Lasagna, Asmara style
Still on the board in the old Italian-era restaurants along Harnet Avenue, and made properly. The clearest thing the colonial period left on a plate.
Bun
Coffee, and a ceremony rather than a drink: green beans roasted at the table, ground, brewed in a clay jebena and poured through three rounds.
Suwa
Home-brewed barley beer, cloudy and low in alcohol, served from a shared jug. The everyday drink outside the bars.
Mies
Fermented honey wine, sweet and stronger than it tastes, poured into a rounded flask. Ordered for celebrations more than for an evening.