Eritrea

Eastern Africa

A Red Sea nation on the Horn of Africa, closed and permit-controlled but quietly extraordinary. Its capital Asmara is a UNESCO-listed modernist city of 1930s Italian architecture, the coast runs down to the old port of Massawa, and offshore the Dahlak Archipelago holds some of the least-dived coral reefs in the Red Sea. Travel outside Asmara requires government permits arranged through a licensed local operator.

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What you can do in Eritrea

Museums & Galleries

AsmaraJan Feb Mar Apr May Oct Nov DecAsmara is a whole city preserved as a work of modern design, and almost no one gets to see it. When Italy made it the capital of its colony in the 1930s it handed the drawing board to modernist architects, who filled the streets with Art Deco cinemas, Rationalist offices and Futurist landmarks, the most famous being the Fiat Tagliero service station of 1938, shaped like an aircraft with two long cantilevered concrete wings. Add the 1937 Cinema Impero, the pastel villas, the palm-lined Harnet Avenue and a daily rhythm built around café macchiatos, and you have the reason UNESCO listed the entire city in 2017. You explore it on foot with a local guide who can get you inside buildings that are usually closed, reading the streets as an open-air gallery of a strange, hopeful moment in twentieth-century architecture. Very little of it has been altered since, which is what makes it singular.

Scuba Diving

Dahlak ArchipelagoJan Feb Mar Apr Oct Nov DecThe Dahlak reefs are among the least-dived in the entire Red Sea, and that is the whole point. More than two hundred islands sit off Massawa in warm, clear water, and because Eritrea has been closed to mass tourism for decades the hard-coral gardens, reef sharks, turtles, rays and schooling fish have had little pressure. There are no dive resorts and no crowds. You dive from a boat arranged out of Massawa, often sleeping aboard or camping on an island, with a small operation that carries its own compressor and gear. Visibility is good and the sites range from shallow coral for easy dives to walls and the occasional wreck. This is expedition diving rather than a resort week, which means self-sufficiency and permits, and in return you get Red Sea reefs the way they looked a generation ago, with almost nobody else in the water.

Best months at a glance

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Museums
Scuba Diving