Eritrea

Eritrea faces the Red Sea along a hot, dry coastline that runs south almost to the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, with the coral islands of the Dahlak Archipelago offshore. Inland an escarpment climbs steeply to a cool highland plateau. In the south-east the land drops into the Danakil Depression, among the hottest places on earth, and westwards the plateau falls to lowland plains crossed by the Barka and the Gash, rivers that flow only after rain.

Adulis, on the Gulf of Zula, was a chief port of Aksum, a trading kingdom whose king Ezana became a Christian. Ottoman forces took Massawa in the sixteenth century. Italy named its colony Eritrea in 1890, from the Greek name for the Red Sea, and later filled Asmara with modernist buildings. British administration followed in 1941. A United Nations plan federated Eritrea with Ethiopia in 1952, and ten years later it became an Ethiopian province. Independence came in May 1993, after three decades of armed struggle.

Coffee is a ceremony, the beans roasted over charcoal and poured three times from a clay jebena, and churches and mosques stand close together in many towns. Injera with zigni, a beef stew reddened with berbere, is the everyday meal, while Italian rule left espresso bars, pasta and a passion for road cycling. Most families farm sorghum, barley and teff or herd camels and goats, and the Bisha mine in the western lowlands produces copper, zinc and gold.