Al Hudaydah

The Tihama coast has traded across the Red Sea with the Horn of Africa and the Hejaz for as long as there are records, but Al Hudaydah itself was a modest fishing and coasting settlement for most of that history. It first gained weight under the Ottomans, who took the Tihama in the 1520s, and its rise came in the 19th century, when Ottoman rule returned to Yemen and the town became the empire's main port on this coast, with the quays and the merchants' quarter whose tall balconied houses still stand near the water. Coffee, hides, grain and cotton left through it, and the older harbour of Mocha to the south declined.

The port grew through the 20th century. A fire destroyed much of the city in 1961, after which it was rebuilt, and its port facilities expanded, with Soviet aid; the highway up the escarpment to Sana'a was completed in the same year. After the revolution of 1962 it served as the principal seaport of the Yemen Arab Republic and the gateway for most imports to the northern highlands, and it remains the fourth-largest city in the country.

That importance made it a target. In the war that began in 2015 the city and its port were struck from the air, and in 2018 a battle for the city was halted by a UN-brokered agreement that left the port working under monitoring; it has since carried much of the food, fuel and aid entering the north, and its functioning has been treated as a matter of national food supply. Fighting resumed across Yemen in July 2026 and grew sharply in September, when an offensive along the Red Sea coast carried the war south to the Bab al-Mandab strait.

Al Hudaydah belongs to the Tihama, whose culture is distinct from the highlands and shaped by heat, the sea and centuries of exchange with Africa. Music and dance here use drums and rhythms closer to the Horn of Africa than to the mountains, and the city has long been known for its singers. Dress differs too: bright printed cloth and wide straw hats in the fields, wrapped futah kilts for men rather than the highland thobe, and the jambiya dagger worn less often than in Sana'a.

Life is lived outdoors and at night. The heat pushes activity to the early morning and to the hours after sunset, when the markets fill, families come out to the shore and tea stalls stay open late. Fishing families, dockworkers, traders and farmers from the surrounding plain make up the city's social fabric, along with communities with roots across the Red Sea in Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan, some of them long settled and some arrived as refugees and migrants passing through the port.

The muhamashin, a marginalised community often described as being of African descent, are numerous in the coastal towns and face long-standing discrimination, although they are Arabic-speaking Muslims like their neighbours. Religion is Shafi'i Sunni, and both Eids are the year's great gatherings, with visiting, new clothes and large shared meals. Qat is chewed in the afternoon here as elsewhere in Yemen, though the leaf is grown up in the mountains and trucked down each day.

Before the war Al Hudaydah held several hundred thousand people and was among the largest cities in Yemen; its population has since been swollen by families displaced from the coast and the surrounding governorates and thinned by those who have fled. It remains the country's principal Red Sea city and the market for a densely farmed plain.

Work comes from the port and the trade around it, fishing from small boats along the coast, transport up the escarpment to Sana'a, farming on the irrigated plain, and the aid operations that have become a major employer. The port's fortunes set the city's: when imports slow, prices rise across the whole north of the country. Fuel shortages, currency collapse and unpaid public salaries have made ordinary household budgeting close to impossible.

The day is organised around the heat. Fishermen return in the early morning and the markets run hard until the sun is high; the middle of the day is spent under cover; and the city comes back to life in the late afternoon and evening, when the qat sessions begin and the night markets open. Electricity is intermittent, with private generators and rooftop solar panels filling the gaps, and clean water is scarce in a city that has suffered repeated cholera outbreaks. Damage from air strikes and years of front lines close to the city is visible in the port area and the outskirts.

Al Hudaydah eats from the Red Sea. The catch — kingfish, mackerel, grouper, snapper, sardines and prawns — is grilled over wood or baked against the inner wall of a clay oven after being rubbed with cumin, coriander, turmeric and chilli, then eaten with the hands with flatbread and a sharp relish of chilli, garlic and tomato known as sahawiq. Fish is also dried and salted and sent up to the highlands, where it appears in stews.

Around the fish sits the wider Tihama table: bread from the tannur oven, sorghum and millet porridges and breads in the villages, bean dishes for breakfast, and goat or lamb stewed with spices for guests. The irrigated plain supplies dates, bananas, mangoes, papaya, watermelon and vegetables, much of which is sold in the night markets, and sesame oil and honey are local products.

Highland dishes travel down the escarpment too, so saltah, the vegetable and meat broth topped with whipped fenugreek and served in a black stone pot, is eaten at midday here as it is in the mountains, and bint al-sahn, the honeyed layered pastry, appears at celebrations. The drinks are qishr, an amber infusion of coffee husks with ginger, and very sweet tea with milk and cardamom, taken in the shade or at a street stall late in the evening. Alcohol is absent.