For Eritreans, Nakfa is much more than a dot on the map: it is the sacred symbol of the war of independence. This remote mountain town in the northern Sahel held out against Ethiopian army sieges for more than a decade and never fell. It became the de facto capital of the resistance and the emblem of a whole people's tenacity. Its symbolic weight is so great that when Eritrea became independent, it named its national currency the 'nakfa'.
Visiting Nakfa is a historical pilgrimage. Its bare hills still hold a maze of underground trenches, shelters and hospitals dug into the rock, where EPLF guerrillas lived, fought and studied for years, sheltered from the bombing. You can still see the remains of tanks, the outline of a destroyed mosque left standing as a memorial, and a martyrs' cemetery honouring the fallen. The whole landscape speaks of sacrifice and resistance.
This guide explains how to reach this far-off corner, what you can see, why Nakfa holds such a central place in the national memory, and what to keep in mind (permits, distances, logistics) for a trip that is less about leisure than about understanding Eritrean history. It is a destination for curious, respectful travellers who are willing to cover a lot of ground to reach the heart of the independence struggle.
Nakfa was an unremarkable town until the war of independence turned it into a legend. The guerrillas took it in 1977 after months of fighting, and it became the impregnable stronghold of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF): despite repeated Ethiopian sieges and bombing raids, it was never retaken. From its underground trenches, the resistance ran its clandestine state for more than a decade, with hospitals, workshops and schools below ground. That heroism made Nakfa the symbol of independence, to the point that the country named its currency after it in 1997. Read its full story on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The mountainous Muslim north: Keren and its camel market, the fertile valley of Elabered and Nakfa, the town that became the symbol of the war of independence and gave its name to the national currency.
Read the history of The north: Keren and Anseba →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 legend, Nakfa was a small, little-known village in the arid mountains of northern Eritrea, in the region Eritreans call the Sahel. Sitting more than 1,700 metres above sea level, in a landscape of bare hills and dry valleys, it lived off livestock, subsistence farming and the occasional passing caravan. Nothing in its modest daily life hinted at the enormous role history had in store for it.
The geography, however, already held the key to its fate. The rugged, mountainous terrain of the Sahel, with its defensible peaks and deep valleys, was almost impregnable for a conventional army and, at the same time, an ideal refuge for a guerrilla force that knew every inch of the ground. When the long war of independence broke out, that harsh landscape would turn Nakfa from a forgotten village into the natural fortress of an entire nation in arms.
Eritrea, an Italian colony from 1890 and later under British administration, had been federated with Ethiopia in 1952 by decision of the UN. Emperor Haile Selassie's unilateral annexation in 1962, which dissolved Eritrean autonomy, sparked a war of independence that would drag on for thirty years. In that conflict, the mountainous north —with Nakfa at its heart— would become the sanctuary of the resistance.
Nakfa's transformation began in the mid-1970s, when the independence movement, growing ever stronger, went on the offensive. After months of hard fighting, Eritrean fighters liberated Nakfa in March 1977, wresting it from the Ethiopian army. From then on, the village was under guerrilla control and became a stronghold of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), the main force in the struggle.
But holding Nakfa would not be peaceful. In the years that followed, Ethiopia —backed first by Western powers and then, after the Derg regime's shift, by the Soviet Union— launched massive offensives to retake the north and crush the insurgency. Nakfa became the symbolic and military target of those campaigns: taking it would have meant breaking the backbone of the resistance. They never managed it.
Year after year, the EPLF held out against the sieges and counter-offensives around Nakfa, in a trench war reminiscent of the great fronts of the 20th century. The front line settled in the Sahel mountains, and the name Nakfa began to take on a meaning that went far beyond the military: it became a byword for the fact that Eritrea would not surrender.
What made Nakfa a fortress was not walls or castles, but the earth itself. To survive the constant bombing by the Ethiopian air force, EPLF fighters dug into the hills an enormous network of trenches, tunnels, foxholes and shelters. Thousands of guerrillas literally lived underground for more than a decade, protected from the bombs and organised with astonishing discipline.
That underground rearguard in the Sahel was much more than a defensive system: it was a clandestine state in the mountains. Caves and galleries housed field hospitals, workshops that repaired weapons and made spare parts, printing presses, pharmacies, schools and even radio stations. The Eritrean guerrillas became famous for their self-sufficiency, their literacy and the large-scale participation of women fighters on an equal footing, something unusual in the region.
Nakfa's mosque, destroyed by the bombing, was left standing just as it was, an unintended monument to the punishment the town endured. That landscape of ruins and trenches tells, better than any speech, how an army of peasants and students, short on resources but long on determination, held out against one of the largest military forces in Africa without giving up its fortress.
Nakfa's resistance eventually paid off. In the late 1980s, after years of attrition, the EPLF switched from defence to attack and began to overrun the Ethiopian army. The fall of Afabet in 1988 was the turning point, and in May 1991 the guerrillas took Asmara, ending thirty years of war. In 1993, after a referendum in which independence was approved almost unanimously, Eritrea was born as a sovereign country.
As it built its new state, the young nation looked for symbols that embodied the spirit of the struggle, and none was more powerful than Nakfa. In 1997, Eritrea replaced the Ethiopian birr with its own currency and named it, fittingly, the 'nakfa', in tribute to the fortress town that never fell. It was a decision loaded with meaning: every banknote and coin in the country carries, in its name, the memory of the Sahel resistance.
And so a remote, humble village became forever part of every Eritrean's daily life. Buying bread, paying for a taxi or changing money means, without a second thought, saying the name Nakfa. Rarely has the geography of resistance become so literally part of a nation's economy and identity.
Once the war was over, Nakfa went back to being a small, isolated village, but one carrying immense symbolic weight. For Eritreans it is almost a place of patriotic pilgrimage: the trenches, the shelters, the ruined mosque and the martyrs' cemetery are preserved there, and it is where tribute is paid to the thousands of fighters who made independence possible. The cult of the 'martyrs' —those who fell for their country— is central to today's Eritrea, and Nakfa is one of its great shrines.
For foreign travellers, visiting Nakfa is unlike any other destination. You don't go for the scenery or the comfort —the village is basic and getting there takes effort— but to understand up close the epic that gave birth to the country. Walking the trenches with a guide, often a former fighter, and hearing how people lived and fought underground leaves an impression that is hard to forget.
Nakfa sums up, in its smallness and remoteness, much of Eritrean identity: tenacity, sacrifice, and pride in an independence won at an extremely high cost. A village that gave its name to an entire nation's currency and that still stands, austere and silent, as proof that resistance can sometimes change the course of history.
