Yemen holds some of the ancient world's most extraordinary heritage — the Queen of Sheba's kingdom, the frankincense trade route, mud-brick skyscrapers 500 years old, and one of the world's most ecologically unique islands — in a country that has been devastated by conflict since 2015. Yemen is not currently accessible as a tourist destination; the ongoing war has caused catastrophic human suffering and severely restricted movement throughout most of the country. But Yemen's cultural and natural inheritance deserves to be known, and its people and their history deserve the respect that comes from understanding what is there.
Sana'a, the capital, is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, with traditions dating the city back to Noah's son Shem. Its UNESCO-listed old city, enclosed within ancient walls, contains over 6,000 tower houses built from rammed earth and dressed stone, with stained glass windows called qamariyyas that cast coloured light into interior spaces. The architecture — up to eight storeys tall, with geometric gypsum friezes and translucent alabaster windows, the buildings rising in clusters that turn amber in the afternoon sun — is genuinely unique, nothing else in the architecture of the Islamic world quite like it. The Souk al-Milh (Salt Market) in the old city has traded spices, silver, cloth and traditional daggers (jambiya) for centuries.
The Hadhramaut Valley in eastern Yemen was, before the conflict, perhaps the country's most accessible and astonishing interior landscape. Shibam, a UNESCO World Heritage Site sometimes called the Manhattan of the Desert, is a 16th-century city of tall mud-brick tower houses rising from a flat valley floor — a pre-modern skyline of extraordinary density and visual drama. The towers, some over 30 metres tall and built from sun-dried mud brick, have been continuously inhabited and maintained. Tarim, further along the valley, contains dozens of mosques and a traditional Islamic scholarly tradition that produced scholars who spread Islam across Southeast Asia.
Socotra Island in the Arabian Sea — accessible by ferry or flight from the mainland — is one of the world's most ecologically unique places, sometimes called the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean. Around a third of its 900 plant species exist nowhere else on Earth. The dragon blood tree (Dracaena cinnabari), with its umbrella-shaped canopy and red resin used since antiquity in medicine and dye, grows in forests across the island's mountains. White sand beaches, turquoise water, canyons of limestone and permanent wind that shapes the trees into sculptural forms combine in a landscape that photographers and naturalists describe as overwhelming. Socotra has been more accessible than the mainland during parts of the conflict, though conditions require current assessment.
The frankincense and myrrh trees of Dhofar (in what is now Oman, near the Yemeni border historically) supplied the ancient world's most valuable trade commodities, and Yemen's landscape still has this quality of deep time — a land that generated the scents of ritual, medicine and trade for civilisations that preceded recorded history.
Yemen's food culture — saltah (a traditional stew topped with fenugreek foam), mandi (slow-roasted lamb over rice), fahsa (braised beef with fenugreek) and the honey of the Hadhramaut region considered among the world's finest — reflects an agricultural and pastoral tradition of great depth.
When peace and stability return to Yemen, it will once again be what it was before the war: one of the most historically significant and culturally extraordinary destinations on Earth. Its people deserve that moment.
