Mukalla

Mukalla began as a fishing settlement on a narrow shelf of land where the mountains of the Hadhramaut plateau come almost to the sea, with a tidal creek behind it giving shelter to boats. Tradition dates the founding to the eleventh century, and for a long time it was overshadowed by Ash Shihr along the coast, the older and more important harbour of the region. The Arabian Sea trade in frankincense, dried fish, dates and, later, coffee and cloth passed up and down this shore, linking Hadhramaut with India, East Africa and the Gulf.

In the nineteenth century the Qu'aiti family, Hadramis who had made fortunes in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad in India, took control of the coast and made Mukalla the capital of their sultanate. From the 1880s the Qu'aiti sultans ruled as a state in treaty relations with Britain, part of the Aden Protectorate, while the Kathiri sultans held the inland valley from Seiyun. Indian money and Indian Ocean taste show in the palace on the seafront and in the merchants' houses of the old town, and the port became the outlet for the whole Hadhramaut valley.

The sultanate was abolished in 1967, when the region became part of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, and Mukalla continued as the administrative centre of Hadhramaut after unification in 1990. It has grown quickly since, spreading along the coast and up the wadis. In the present war, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula seized the city in 2015 and was driven out in 2016; the eastern governorates have changed hands more than once since, and the city has lived through blockade, damage and economic collapse. In December 2025 two vessels docked at the port were hit in an airstrike.

Mukalla is a Hadrami city, and Hadrami identity is bound up with emigration. Families here have relatives in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and East Africa, and the movement of people and money in both directions has shaped the city for centuries. Returning merchants built the seafront houses, imported furniture and habits, and gave the local Arabic its loanwords; Hadrami communities abroad, in turn, carried the region's religious scholarship and its architecture across the Indian Ocean.

Religious life follows the Shafi'i school of Sunni Islam, and the Sufi tradition of the inland valley, centred on the schools of Tarim, is respected here too. Visits to saints' tombs, the chanting of religious poetry and the observance of the Prophet's birthday are part of the calendar. Weddings are large and public affairs with drumming, dancing and sung verse, and the coast keeps its own seafaring songs, sung to the rhythm of work on boats.

Everyday manners are those of Yemen as a whole: long greetings, coffee or tea pressed on any visitor, careful respect for age, and a sharp separation between men's and women's social spaces. Afternoons belong to qat sessions, which do the work of meetings and cafés alike. The city has a university and a professional class of teachers, doctors and civil servants, and pride in Hadramaut's distinct history sits alongside a wariness born of the past decade.

Around 595,000 people live in Mukalla, which makes it the sixth-largest city in Yemen and by far the largest in the east and the place where the region's administration, hospitals, university and trade are concentrated. The site allows very little room: the city runs in a long ribbon between the cliffs and the sea, and new building has had to climb the wadis behind or spread east along the coastal plain towards the airport.

Work is the port, fishing, government, trade and services, with oil and gas from the interior passing through the governorate and providing employment for some. Fishing is the visible daily activity — boats going out from the creek and the catch sold beside the water — and dried and salted fish is still traded inland. Money sent home from relatives in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf supports many households, and the war has added displaced families from other governorates to the city's population.

The crisis of the wider country shapes daily life: the rial's collapse has made imported food and fuel expensive, public salaries have lost much of their value, and power cuts in the humid summer heat are a recurring grievance and a recurring cause of protest. Water supply and sanitation are strained, and Cyclone Chapala destroyed much of the waterfront in 2015. The rhythm is early mornings, a quiet afternoon indoors, and a long evening when the corniche fills with families and the shops reopen.

Mukalla eats from the sea. Kingfish, tuna, snapper and sardines come in at the creek, and fish is grilled over charcoal, fried, or slapped against the hot wall of a clay tannur oven and served with flatbread and sahawiq, the green sauce of coriander, chilli, garlic and tomato. Fish is also salted and sun-dried on this coast, a trade older than the city, and dried fish is sold inland to the valley towns. Lobster and squid are landed seasonally and go mostly for export.

The meat dishes are those of Hadhramaut. Mandi is meat, usually goat or chicken, cooked in a sealed pit oven above rice that takes up the fat and smoke; haneeth is lamb rubbed with spice and roasted in the same kind of oven until it falls apart. Both are eaten from a shared platter with the right hand, and both are the food of weddings and of guests. Everyday meals lean on rice, lentils, beans, eggs and vegetables, with bread from a tannur at almost every one.

Dates from the valley's palm groves and honey from the side wadis, especially the sidr honey of Wadi Dawan, are the prestige local products, sold in the markets and given as gifts. Tea is drunk black and very sweet through the day, often spiced with cardamom, and qishr, an infusion of dried coffee husks, is the other common hot drink. Sweets include bint al-sahn, a layered bread eaten with honey and clarified butter, and halwa sold in slabs.