Eritrea Safaris, Tours & Holidays

Eritrea is a northeast African country on the Red Sea coast. It shares borders with Ethiopia, Sudan, and Djibouti. The capital city, Asmara, is known for its Italian colonial buildings, like St. Joseph’s Cathedral, as well as art deco structures. Italian, Egyptian, and Turkish architecture in Massawa reflects the port city’s colourful history. Notable buildings here include St. Mariam Cathedral and the Imperial Palace.

Over many millennia, various fishing villages and semi-nomadic pastoralists settled on the coast and inland respectively. Nilotic, Hamitic, and Semitic people migrating across Africa began to settle here and intermingled. Of course, as well as resulting in the trading of goods, it also caused the sharing of ideas and beliefs. New skills were acquired; new languages began developing, some still spoken to this day, and large civilizations developed.

Around three thousand years ago, the kingdom of Aksum was founded by; legend has it, the great, great-grandson of Moses. Whatever the truth, it was, from the perspective of building empires, in a hugely advantageous spot, and would eventually stretch from Tigray in modern-day Ethiopia, across what is now Eritrea, to the coast and over the Red Sea to the southern tip of Yemen. It became one of the main powers of the ancient world.