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Capital: Asmara
Population: 5.5 million+ (No census has ever been held, estimated from 3.7–6.5 million.)
Language: Tigrinya, Arabic and English – working languages, nine national languages recognised as equal — Tigrinya, Tigre, Saho, Afar, Bilen, Kunama, Nara, Beja and Arabic.
1 – Massawa (above)
Massawa, built on two coral islands linked to the mainland by causeways, has traded across the Red Sea for more than 1,000 years, passing from the Ottomans in 1557 to Egypt in 1865 and Italy in 1885, and served as the first capital of Italian Eritrea.
Its old town of coral-stone houses and mosques has earned Massawa the name “Pearl of the Red Sea”, while the former imperial palace, Haile Selassie’s winter residence, was wrecked when Ethiopian aircraft bombed the city in 1990.
One of the hottest towns on Earth, Massawa was Italy’s main naval base on the Red Sea, and in early April 1941 the Italians scuttled their ships to block the harbour before Commonwealth and Free French forces took the town on 8 April.
2 – Adulis
Adulis, on the Gulf of Zula about 40 km south of Massawa, was the great Red Sea port of the Kingdom of Aksum, which the 3rd-century prophet Mani is said to have ranked with Rome, Persia and China among the four great kingdoms of the world.
The 1st-century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea describes ivory, tortoiseshell and rhinoceros horn leaving Adulis, whose little-excavated ruins include the remains of churches, among them a 5th-century basilica uncovered in 1914.
In the 6th century the traveller Cosmas Indicopleustes copied an inscription at Adulis, since lost, in which Ptolemy III of Egypt boasted of war elephants captured in this region.
3 – Qohaito
Qohaito, on a plateau at about 2,600 m on the edge of the Eritrean escarpment, was a pre-Aksumite and Aksumite town often identified with Koloe, which the Periplus names as the first ivory market inland from Adulis.
The columns of Mariam Wakiro, an ancient temple or early church, rise among the ruins of Qohaito, alongside rock-cut tombs such as the so-called “Tomb of the Egyptian” and prehistoric rock paintings in the nearby caves of Adi Alauti.
The ancient Safira dam, built to store water on the dry plateau, is among the remains that led Eritrea to place the Qohaito cultural landscape on UNESCO’s Tentative List in 2011.
4 – Debre Bizen Monastery
Debre Bizen Monastery, on a mountain of nearly 2,500 m above the town of Nefasit, was founded around 1361 by the monk Abune Filipos.
Pilgrims reach Debre Bizen by a steep climb of around three hours, and its library is said to hold more than 1,000 manuscripts.
Women, and by tradition female animals, are barred from Debre Bizen, and legend has it that Filipos preferred facing lions to facing women.
5 – Asmara
Asmara, at 2,325 m on the highland plateau, grew by tradition from four villages united as Arbaete Asmara, and became the capital of Italian Eritrea around 1897–1900, when the seat of government moved up from Massawa.
Largely rebuilt in the late 1930s as Italy’s base for the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, Asmara is a showcase of modernist architecture, from the Cinema Impero of 1937 to the Fiat Tagliero service station of 1938, and in 2017 became Eritrea’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Asmara fell to British forces on 1 April 1941, and from 2001 to 2003 an Irish Army transport company was based in the city with the UN mission that watched over the buffer zone after the Eritrean-Ethiopian War.