Eritrea
A Red Sea highland with a reputation for solitude
Eritrea commands a long stretch of Red Sea coastline and a cool highland interior, a country that fought one of Africa's longest liberation wars and has since turned famously inward. Its capital, Asmara, is an Art Deco time capsule of Italian colonial modernism, its boulevards lined with cinemas, cafés, and futurist garages that earned the whole city a place on UNESCO's World Heritage list. Reserved and tightly controlled, Eritrea remains one of the most closed societies on the planet, yet its strategic seafront and ancient ties to the Red Sea trade keep it firmly on the map.
The land rises sharply from a hot, arid coastal strip and the Danakil Depression to a temperate central plateau, then falls away to western lowlands toward Sudan. The highlands, where most Eritreans live, reach their summit at Emba Soira, 3,018 meters above sea level. Offshore lie the Dahlak Islands, a coral archipelago in the Red Sea. The climate ranges from searing along the coast and in the Danakil, one of the hottest places on Earth, to mild and green in the uplands during the summer rains. Much of the country is rugged, dry, and sparsely vegetated.
The territory's history runs deep, encompassing the ancient kingdom of Aksum and centuries of Red Sea commerce. Italy made it a colony in 1890, and after a British interlude it was federated and then annexed by Ethiopia, triggering a thirty-year war for independence that ended in victory in 1991, with formal statehood declared in 1993. Since then Eritrea has been governed by a single party with no national elections and an open-ended national service that has driven many young people abroad. Its diverse population spans nine ethnic groups, and Tigrinya and Arabic serve as working languages, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam are both deeply rooted.