Asmara is one of the most unusual cities on the planet: an African capital more than 2.300 metres up that looks like an Italian town from the 1930s frozen in time. Its tree-lined avenues, its cafés with marble counters and espresso machines, its art deco cinemas and its modernist villas make it an open-air museum of 20th-century urban planning. In 2017 UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site for being an exceptional example of a modernist city adapted to an African context.
Founded as an Italian military outpost and transformed from 1935 into the dream capital of Mussolini's colonial empire, Asmara holds more than 4.300 buildings in futurist, rationalist, art deco and monumental styles, put up in barely two decades. The jewel is the Fiat Tagliero petrol station, with its 30-metre concrete wings that look ready for take-off, but the whole city is a catalogue of architectural daring that is surprisingly well preserved.
This guide takes a practical look at Asmara: what to see in its modernist centre, how to catch the historic steam train or go up to the Debre Bizen monastery, where to have a macchiato like it's the 1940s and, above all, how to get around a country that runs on cash only and where you need a special permit to leave the capital. With two or three well-planned days, Asmara leaves an impression unlike any other city.
Asmara grew out of the union of four highland villages and developed as an Italian military outpost after the occupation of 1889. In 1897 it became the capital of the colony of Eritrea, but its great transformation came in the 1930s, when the fascist regime turned it into a showcase of the empire and a laboratory of modern architecture: within a few years cinemas, hotels, churches, factories and the legendary Fiat Tagliero station went up. After the Second World War it passed through British administration, federation with and annexation by Ethiopia, and was the backdrop to the long war of independence until 1991. Its story —from village to 'Piccola Roma', from colony to capital of a young nation— is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of Eritrea at 2.300 metres: Asmara, the astonishing art deco city on the World Heritage List, and the temperate plateau from which the legendary railway descends to the Red Sea.
Read the history of Asmara and the central plateau →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it became a city, Asmara was a handful of scattered villages on the central plateau, more than 2,300 metres up, in a land of herders and farmers on the Eritrean highlands. Tradition says the name comes from the Tigrinya 'Arbaete Asmara', 'the four (villages) are united', a reference to the merger of those small communities, which decided to join forces to defend themselves. That is where 'Asmara' comes from, a place name about unity that predates the city we know today by centuries.
Through the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the region was part of the orbit of the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia-Abyssinia and its northern provinces. It was shaped by Tewahedo Orthodox Christianity, which left churches and monasteries in the surrounding mountains, such as Debre Bizen. The plateau was a crossroads between the Abyssinian interior and the Red Sea coast, where the Ottomans and Egyptians controlled ports such as Massawa.
The big turning point came in the late 19th century with Italian colonial expansion. After landing at Massawa in 1885, Italy gradually pushed inland and occupied the plateau. In 1889 it took control of Asmara, and in 1890 it officially proclaimed the colony of Eritrea, whose name comes from the Greek 'Erythra Thalassa', the 'Red Sea'. In 1897 the colony's capital moved from Massawa to Asmara, trading the stifling heat of the coast for the cool, healthy climate of the highlands. The transformation of the four villages into a city had begun.
In the first colonial decades, Asmara grew slowly, with buildings in Lombard and early colonial styles such as the 1923 Catholic cathedral. Its real transformation came in the 1930s, when Mussolini's Fascist Italy decided to make it the capital and showcase of its dreamed-of empire in East Africa. With the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935-36 and the creation of Italian East Africa, Asmara filled with money, engineers, architects and workers, and threw itself into a building frenzy like no other.
In just five or six years, hundreds of buildings went up, applying the latest trends in European architecture (rationalism, futurism, art deco, monumentalism) to an African setting. Lavish cinemas appeared, such as the Impero (1937), along with daring service stations like the Fiat Tagliero (1938) with its concrete wings, plus hotels, villas, factories, offices, churches and even a swimming pool. The city filled with Italians: at its peak, tens of thousands of settlers lived in Asmara, which came to have a huge share of Italian residents and an astonishing number of European-style cinemas, cafés and shops. People called it 'Piccola Roma', little Rome.
That urban planning had a dark side, though. The city was designed under racial segregation laws that kept the best neighbourhoods and services for Italians and pushed the Eritrean population into outlying areas and a subordinate role. The brilliant architecture and imported modernity lived side by side with colonial racism and exploitation. That dazzling Asmara was both an avant-garde laboratory and a tool of imperial rule.
The Italian imperial adventure was short-lived. In the Second World War, British forces defeated Italy in East Africa and occupied Eritrea in 1941, and the United Kingdom ran it for a decade. Many Italians left, although a sizeable community stayed on and continued to shape the city's life and food. Under British administration, Asmara went through a period of relative political openness and debate about its future, with Eritrean parties and newspapers for the first time.
When the war ended, Eritrea's fate was left to the new United Nations. In 1952, the UN decided to federate Eritrea with Ethiopia under the crown of Emperor Haile Selassie, giving Eritrea autonomy and its own parliament and flag within a federation. Asmara was the capital of this federated unit. But the autonomy did not last long: over the decade, the Ethiopian government steadily hollowed out Eritrea's institutions, banning parties, censoring the press and imposing Amharic.
In 1962, Haile Selassie formally dissolved the federation and annexed Eritrea as just another Ethiopian province, wiping out its autonomy. For many Eritreans this was the final betrayal and the trigger for armed struggle. By then the first shots had already been fired in what would become one of Africa's longest wars of independence, a war that would mark Asmara for the next three decades.
Eritrea's War of Independence began in 1961 and lasted thirty years, until 1991. Guerrilla fronts such as the ELF and, above all, the EPLF (Eritrean People's Liberation Front) waged a titanic struggle against the Ethiopian army, first under Haile Selassie's empire and later under Mengistu's Marxist Derg regime, backed by the Soviet Union. It was a war of trenches, mountains and enormous sacrifice, and civilians paid the heaviest price.
Asmara was in Ethiopian hands for almost the entire conflict and lived through years of martial law, checkpoints, curfews and hardship. Cities closer to the front, such as Massawa and Dekemhare, suffered devastating bombing and fighting. Many of the recycled metal goods in Asmara's Medebar market are a legacy of that time of scarcity, when everything had to be made and repaired with whatever was at hand. The Eritrean diaspora, scattered around the world, kept the cause alive from exile.
The end came in May 1991: after years of advances, EPLF forces took Asmara as the Derg regime collapsed in Ethiopia. In 1993, an internationally monitored referendum overwhelmingly confirmed the wish for independence, and Eritrea officially declared its independence, with Asmara as the capital of the new nation. The city that had been born as an Italian colonial outpost was finally the capital of a sovereign country, born out of one of the longest wars on the continent.
Independence brought hope, but also new challenges. A devastating border war with Ethiopia between 1998 and 2000 hit the country again. The following decades were marked by a one-party regime, a long compulsory national service and deep international isolation, which earned Eritrea the disputed nickname of 'the North Korea of Africa'. Oddly enough, that isolation helped freeze Asmara in time: without the property boom that flattened the historic centres of so many cities, its modernist architecture survived almost intact.
The world finally recognised this urban treasure on 8 July 2017, when UNESCO inscribed 'Asmara: A Modernist City of Africa' on the World Heritage List. It was the first modernist site in Africa to receive that distinction. The protected area covers 481 hectares of the city centre and more than 4,300 buildings: cinemas, cafés, villas, service stations, factories, churches and mosques from the 1920s and 1930s, a one-of-a-kind ensemble of 20th-century urban planning. The listing recognised both the quality of the architecture and how exceptionally well it has been preserved.
Today Asmara is a calm, clean and safe city with an unhurried pace, where life goes on among cafés, churches, mosques and tree-lined avenues. The Italian past lives on in the language, the food and the façades, mixed with the Tigrinya, Tigre and other Eritrean cultures. For travellers, walking around Asmara is a unique experience: an African capital that seems frozen in the 1930s, proud of its history of resistance and home to one of the most extraordinary modernist ensembles anywhere.
