Aden

Aden is the only city I know of that is simultaneously a port, a crater, and a former empire’s most strategically significant possession. The volcanic geology defines everything: the town called Crater sits inside the caldera of an extinct volcano, surrounded on three sides by lava rock ridgelines that turn purple at dusk, with the sea visible through the gap at the south. The British, who held Aden from 1839 until 1967, understood immediately what they had: a natural harbor of exceptional quality and a defensible position that would be very difficult to assault. They were right about the harbor. The defensibility proved more complicated.

I came to Aden from the north, which means I came through the geography before I came to the city—the volcanic rock formations above Little Aden, the industrial sprawl of the port, the long approach through Maalla with its corniche and its memory of colonial ambition. By the time I reached Crater, I had been in the car for most of a day and was prepared to be unimpressed. I was wrong.

The Crater District

The old city inside the volcano is a lesson in layering. Hadhrami merchant houses sit next to Ottoman mosques next to British colonial arcades, all of it compressed into a few square kilometers with the ridgeline pressing down from above. The main street through Crater has a covered market section that smells of frankincense and grilled fish and petrol in approximately equal measure. The fish is the best argument for staying: the Indian Ocean access means the morning catch is extraordinary, and the grilled samak at the harbor-side restaurants comes with a tamarind sauce I have been trying to recreate in my kitchen ever since.

The Cisterns of Tawila

The cisterns date from before the Common Era—a series of tanks cut into the volcanic rock on the hillside above Crater, designed to collect and store rainwater for a city that gets almost none of it. They are enormous and they are old in a way that stops feeling like a number and starts feeling like a geological fact. Standing in one of the upper tanks, looking down over the Crater district to the harbor, I had the particular sensation that occasionally ambushes you in very old places: the sense that the present moment is a very thin layer on top of an enormous amount of accumulated time.

The Corniche at Night

Aden’s corniche stretches along the bay north of Crater, and at night it becomes the city’s social infrastructure. Families with children, men playing cards at small tables, food carts selling aseeda and sweet tea, the occasional vendor of improbable things. The sea air at night in Aden has salt in it but also something else—diesel from the port, jasmine from gardens somewhere inland—and the combination is specific enough that I think I would recognize it blind. Lia and I walked the full length of it one evening, which took longer than expected because we kept stopping to watch things.

What the British Left

The colonial residue in Aden is architectural and bureaucratic and still legible. The government buildings have that particular institutional gravity of empire; the port infrastructure dates from the same era. What’s interesting is how thoroughly the city has metabolized it all—the colonial buildings are just buildings now, used for whatever seems most practical, their origins present but not particularly emphasized. History as wallpaper rather than monument.

When to go: October through April. Aden sits in a rain shadow and the humidity is manageable in winter. Summer temperatures climb above 40°C with Gulf humidity; the city empties of anyone who has somewhere cooler to be. The fish market at dawn is worth an early alarm regardless of season.