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Capital: Addis Ababa
Population: 135 million+
Language: Amharic, Afaan Oromo, Somali, Afar and Tigrinya
Note: Ethiopia keeps its own calendar of thirteen months, running seven to eight years behind the Gregorian one — which is why the country celebrated the millennium in 2007.
1 – Simien Mountains and Ras Dashen (also above)
A wall of jagged peaks, plunging gorges, and 1,500m cliffs in northern Ethiopia — the eroded rim of a colossal ancient volcano — the Simien Mountains form part of the “Roof of Africa” and were among the very first places named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, back in 1978.
Trekkers walk for days along the escarpment past giant lobelias and cloud-filled valleys, the longest routes climbing to Ras Dashen at around 4,550m — the highest point in Ethiopia and the whole Horn of Africa, a bare, boulder-strewn summit where frost and overnight snow bite despite the equatorial latitude, and whose Amharic name means something like “the general who fights out front”.
The heights are shared with three creatures found nowhere else on Earth — the walia ibex, the Ethiopian wolf, rarest wolf in the world, and huge troops of gelada, nicknamed “bleeding-heart” monkeys for the scarlet patch on their chests and the last grass-grazing primates on the planet, cropping the plateau in bands hundreds strong.
2 – Blue Nile Falls
About 30km downstream from Lake Tana near the town of Bahir Dar, the Blue Nile hurls itself over a 45m basalt cliff at the falls Ethiopians call Tis Issat — “the water that smokes” — for the clouds of mist and rainbows it throws into the air.
In full rainy-season flood the cascade spreads more than 400m wide and truly thunders (though a hydro plant now tames it much of the year); the walk to the viewpoints crosses a graceful 17th-century Portuguese bridge, the first ever built across the Blue Nile.
For all that Egypt is called “the gift of the Nile,” most of that gift starts here — the Blue Nile, rising in the Ethiopian highlands, supplies well over half of the water that flows all the way down to the Mediterranean.
3 – Wonchi Lake
A serene crater lake cradled inside the caldera of a long-extinct volcano in the green highlands west of Addis Ababa, ringed by forest, farmland and waterfalls at around 3,000m — one of the most beautiful and least-known corners of Ethiopia.
Visitors descend into the crater on foot or on horseback to reach the lakeshore, where they can soak in iron-rich hot springs, hike the forested rim, or take a boat out onto the water; the town of Ambo, source of Ethiopia’s famous mineral water, lies on the way.
On an island in the middle of the lake sits the little Cherkos monastery, founded in the 13th century — and among its treasures is an old church bell said to have belonged to Emperor Fasilides, the great castle-builder of Gondar.
4 – Lalibela
High in the northern highlands at around 2,500m, eleven churches were cut down into solid volcanic rock in the 12th and 13th centuries under King Gebre Meskel Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty — a New Jerusalem raised, tradition holds, after Saladin took the real one in 1187 and closed the pilgrim roads to Ethiopian Christians; it was one of the twelve original World Heritage Sites, listed in 1978.
They were not built but excavated: a trench cut on all four sides of the bedrock, then the interior hollowed out from the top down, the whole complex linked by tunnels and passages with a stream between the two groups named the Jordan — and standing alone in its own pit is Bete Giyorgis, a Greek cross sunk some twelve metres into the ground, invisible until you reach the rim.
None of it is a ruin: the churches are still served by priests, still full of incense, and still draw thousands of white-robed pilgrims at Ethiopian Christmas — and the story told here is that angels took over the carving each night while the masons slept.
5 – Lake Tana
Ethiopia’s largest lake, a vast highland sea dotted with islands, Lake Tana is the source of the Blue Nile — and for centuries it has been a spiritual heartland, its remote islands sheltering dozens of ancient Ethiopian Orthodox monasteries.
Take a boat out to visit them: the round, thatched church of Ura Kidane Mihret, ablaze with vivid medieval murals, or Daga Estifanos, which guards the mummified remains of several medieval emperors along with crowns, crosses and centuries-old manuscripts; out on the water, fishermen still pole papyrus-reed boats little changed since the age of the pharaohs.
One island, Tana Qirqos, holds an extraordinary claim — Ethiopian tradition says the Ark of the Covenant was hidden here for centuries before being carried to Aksum, where the Church says it still rests today.
6 – Fasilides’ Palace
In the highland city of Gondar stands Fasil Ghebbi, a walled royal city of stone castles and palaces founded in 1636 by Emperor Fasilides — the ruler who ended centuries of wandering, tent-dwelling courts by making Gondar Ethiopia’s first permanent capital.
Behind its 900m ramparts rise a cluster of turreted castles — Fasilides’ own soaring keep the grandest — whose blend of Ethiopian, Portuguese and Indian design looks so like medieval Europe that Gondar is nicknamed the “Camelot of Africa.”
Just outside the walls lies Fasilides’ Bath, a sunken stone pool filled with water once a year for Timkat, Ethiopia’s Epiphany, when thousands of white-robed pilgrims plunge into the blessed water in a joyous mass celebration.
7 – Lake Shala
A deep, brooding alkaline lake in the Great Rift Valley south of Addis Ababa, Lake Shala fills the flooded crater of a collapsed volcano — at some 266m, the deepest of all Ethiopia’s Rift Valley lakes, and perhaps the deepest in Africa north of the Equator.
Its steep, rocky shores steam with sulphurous hot springs, and its remote islands host the most important breeding colony of great white pelicans in Africa; paired with shallow neighbouring Lake Abijatta, whose flats turn pink with flamingos, it forms the heart of a birdwatchers’ national park.
There’s a quirk to those pelicans: they nest on Shala’s islands but can’t feed there, because the soda-rich water holds almost no fish — so they commute the few kilometres to shallower Lake Abijatta to fish, then carry the catch home to their chicks.
8 – Harar
Out east where the highlands drop towards the Somali lowlands, the walled city of Harar Jugol has been a centre of Islamic learning and trade since the 10th century and was the capital of its own emirate — with 82 mosques and more than a hundred shrines packed inside barely a square kilometre, it is regarded by many Muslims as the fourth holiest city of Islam, and UNESCO listed it in 2006.
Inside the 16th-century walls the lanes twist between painted houses hung with baskets, opening onto markets and gateways; one ornate merchant’s house is now a museum to Arthur Rimbaud, who abandoned poetry at twenty and spent his last years here trading coffee and guns.
Every evening, just outside the walls, men squat in the dark and hand-feed wild hyenas that come down off the hills — passing strips of meat from their fingers and sometimes from a stick held in their teeth — a bargain struck generations ago to keep the animals away from the livestock, and kept up ever since.
9 – Addis Ababa
Emperor Menelik II and Empress Taytu founded the capital in 1886 and called it Addis Ababa, “new flower”; at around 2,355m it is one of the highest capitals on Earth, and within a decade Menelik’s army had destroyed an invading Italian force at Adwa — the victory that kept Ethiopia the one African country never colonised, bar the Italian occupation of 1936 to 1941.
The National Museum is the reason to come: it holds Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton found in the Afar desert in 1974 that rewrote the human family tree; beyond it lie Holy Trinity Cathedral with Haile Selassie’s tomb, the sprawl of Merkato, and the African Union’s headquarters.
The team that found her spent the night celebrating with the Beatles playing on repeat, so she became Lucy — after “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” — though Ethiopians call her Dinknesh, which means “you are marvellous”.
10 – Aksum
In the far north near the Eritrean border stood the capital of the Aksumite empire, which a third-century Persian writer ranked among the four great powers of the world alongside Rome, Persia and China — a state that minted its own gold coinage, ran the Red Sea trade, and adopted Christianity in the fourth century, among the first anywhere to do so.
A field of carved granite stelae marks the royal tombs, the fallen giant among them weighing over 500 tonnes — the largest single block of stone anyone has ever attempted to raise — with ruined palaces, rock-cut tombs and the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion nearby, beside which stands the guarded chapel and its single monk, chosen for life and never permitted to leave the compound.
One of the great obelisks left in 1937, looted by Mussolini’s men and re-erected in Rome; Italy took nearly seventy years to give it back, finally flying it home in three sections in 2005 aboard one of the largest cargo aircraft in the world.