Yemen

Southern Arabia was the land the Romans called Arabia Felix, "Fortunate Arabia", rich from the trade in frankincense and myrrh and from control of the sea route to India. The kingdom of Saba (biblical Sheba) built the great dam at Marib around the eighth century BC, and its collapse centuries later passed into legend. Judaism and Christianity took root before Islam arrived in the seventh century, and a Zaydi Shia imamate was established in the northern highlands around 897, ruling in various forms for over a thousand years.

The Ottomans held parts of Yemen intermittently, and Britain seized the port of Aden in 1839 as a coaling station on the route to India, developing it into a major harbour and, later, a protectorate over the surrounding sultanates. In 1962 a coup and civil war ended the imamate in the north, creating the Yemen Arab Republic; when Britain withdrew from Aden in 1967, the south became the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, the only communist state in the Middle East. The two Yemens united in 1990 under Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had led the north, though a southern secession attempt in 1994 was crushed.

Saleh's three-decade rule ended in 2011–12 amid Arab Spring protests. The Houthi movement — Zaydi revivalists from the far north — swept into Sana'a in 2014–15, and a Saudi-led coalition intervened to restore the internationally recognised government, with Iran backing the Houthis. The UN puts the dead at more than 150,000 in the fighting and more than 227,000 in all once famine and the collapse of healthcare are counted; millions have been displaced, and the country has been divided between rival authorities that each claim to be its government, producing what the UN has repeatedly called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

A truce brokered by the UN in 2022 brought roughly four years of relative calm. Fighting resumed in July 2026, and in September an offensive along the Red Sea coast turned the Bab al-Mandab strait — the sea lane between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden — into a second contested choke point in the war that began when the United States and Israel attacked Iran in February 2026. The Houthis declared the strait closed to certain shipping, struck cities in southern Saudi Arabia, and tens of thousands of people were displaced within weeks.

Yemen is tribal, conservative, and deeply religious, split between a Zaydi Shia tradition in the northern highlands and a Shafi'i Sunni majority elsewhere. Tribal law and mediation remain powerful, especially outside the cities, and the carrying of the jambiya, a curved dagger worn at the belt, is a mark of manhood and status for many men.

Hospitality is a strong obligation, and the qat chew — a long communal afternoon session in which men (and, separately, some women) chew the leaves of the mildly narcotic Catha edulis — is the central social ritual, despite the enormous toll it takes on water, farmland, family budgets, and productivity.

Yemeni craft and building traditions are distinctive: the multi-storey tower-houses of rammed earth, brick, and white gypsum tracery in Sana'a and Shibam, silverwork, and honey production. Socotra has its own Soqotri language and a herding and date-farming culture shaped by centuries of isolation.

Around 35 million people live in Yemen, and the war has left the great majority dependent on humanitarian aid: the UN has counted some 24 million people, close to three quarters of the population, as needing help, and millions have been displaced. The economy has largely collapsed: public salaries often go unpaid, the currency has fractured, fuel and cooking gas are scarce and expensive, and basic services barely function.

Water is the country's deepest structural problem — Yemen was already one of the most water-stressed nations on Earth, and qat cultivation consumes much of what remains. In the towns and cities, life means queuing, power cuts, rising prices, and the constant background of conflict; in the countryside, subsistence farming and herding continue under the same strains.

Socotra, though poor and cut off, has been comparatively calm, its people living by fishing, herding goats, growing dates, and, increasingly, guiding the small number of tourists who fly in.

Yemeni cuisine is rich and spiced. The national dish is saltah: a bubbling brown meat stew topped with hulba, a whipped fenugreek froth, and sahawiq, a spicy sauce of fresh herbs, garlic, and chillies, scooped up with flatbread. Fahsa is a similar stew of lamb and lamb broth, and mandi — meat and rice cooked together in a pit oven — is the celebration dish, shared from a communal platter.

Bread comes in many forms, from the tandoor-baked khubz to the homemade malooj and the sourdough flatbread lahoh. Aseed (a lump of cooked wheat dough, eaten with broth, butter, or honey), shafut (flatbread in spiced buttermilk), and zurbian (spiced meat and rice) round out the table. The sweet bint al-sahn is a layered honey cake.

Coffee is Yemen's gift to the world — the port of Mokha gave its name to mocha coffee — and the husks are brewed as a spiced infusion called qishr. Black tea is drunk all day, and the afternoon belongs to qat.

Yemen's cultural sites are among the most striking anywhere and are, for the most part, currently unreachable. The old walled city of Sana'a, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a dense quarter of decorated tower-houses, mosques, and gardens, inhabited for more than 2,500 years. Shibam, in the Hadhramaut, is a grid of mud-brick tower blocks five to eleven storeys high, some of them over 30 metres, often called the "Manhattan of the desert" and also UNESCO-listed, as is the Tihama town of Zabid, once a great centre of Islamic learning. UNESCO put both Shibam and old Sana'a on its list of cultural heritage at risk in 2015.

Elsewhere the mainland holds the Marib dam and Sabaean temple ruins, the 1920s rock palace of Dar al-Hajar outside Sana'a, the terraced highland villages of the Haraz Mountains, the wadi oasis towns of the Hadhramaut, and the port and volcanic crater of Aden.

Socotra is the one part of Yemen that receives visitors: a UNESCO-listed island with a third of its plant life found nowhere else, including the umbrella-crowned dragon's blood tree, the best known of its endemic plants, along with white dunes heaped up by the monsoon winds, the Ramsar-protected salt lagoon of Detwah, the inscribed limestone cave of Hoq, and empty beaches, all seen on camping trips by 4x4.