Addis Ababa — 'new flower' in Amharic — is a young capital for an ancient country: it was founded by Empress Taitu in 1886, next to the hot springs at the foot of Mount Entoto, and in just over a century it went from imperial camp to a metropolis of more than five million people, seat of the African Union and the political heart of the whole continent. It is a city of dizzying contrasts: glass skyscrapers next to tin-roofed neighbourhoods, Orthodox churches with a liturgy that goes back a thousand years, and the largest open-air market in Africa.
For travellers, Addis is above all the gateway to Ethiopia and the place to understand the country before setting off on the northern historic route or into the deserts of the east. This is where you'll find Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old fossil that rewrote the history of humankind; this is where the coffee ceremony as we know it was born; and this is where injera with wat is eaten at shared tables while masinko music plays. The altitude — over 2,300 metres — makes the climate surprisingly cool for somewhere so close to the equator.
This guide covers the practical side: what to see in one or two days (National Museum, Ethnological Museum, Holy Trinity Cathedral, the Mercato, Mount Entoto), how to get around a huge and chaotic city, where to eat and sleep, and how to use Addis as a base to fly the historic route with Ethiopian Airlines, which offers discounted domestic fares if you fly into Ethiopia on its planes. Also how to deal with the peculiar Ethiopian calendar and clock, which can confuse new arrivals.
Addis Ababa was born in 1886, when Empress Taitu Betul persuaded her husband, Emperor Menelik II, to come down from cold Mount Entoto and found a new capital beside the Filwoha hot springs. She chose the name, 'new flower'. The city grew quickly thanks to the introduction of the eucalyptus (which solved the shortage of firewood) and the railway to Djibouti, opened in 1917. It was the capital of an empire that defeated Italy at Adwa in 1896, endured Mussolini's fascist occupation between 1936 and 1941 — including the Yekatit 12 massacre in 1937 —, saw the last emperor, Haile Selassie, fall in the Derg's Marxist coup in 1974, and from 1963 became the seat of the Organisation of African Unity, today the African Union. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The political heart of Ethiopia: Africa's highest capital, founded by Menelik II, and the Awash Valley, where human history begins.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Unlike the ancient cities of northern Ethiopia, Addis Ababa is young: barely a century and a half ago, it didn't exist. It owes its birth to a woman with political vision, Empress Taitu Betul, wife of Emperor Menelik II. In the late 19th century, the imperial court was based on the cold, windy heights of Mount Entoto, an uncomfortable spot short of firewood. Taitu fell in love with the valley spread out at the foot of the mountain, warm and fed by the Filwoha hot springs, where she liked to bathe, and she persuaded Menelik to move the royal residence there. The new settlement was founded around 1886, and it was Taitu herself who named it Addis Ababa, 'new flower' in Amharic.
The imperial camp grew quickly around Menelik's palace, the Gebbi. But a problem typical of Ethiopian capitals soon appeared: deforestation. The court and its huge entourage burned so much firewood that the surrounding land was stripped bare, and there was even talk of moving the capital again, as had happened so many times before. The solution came from abroad: in the early 20th century the Australian eucalyptus was introduced on a massive scale, a fast-growing tree that supplied timber and fuel without running out. The eucalyptus forests, which still cover Mount Entoto and give the city its distinctive scent, saved Addis Ababa and fixed it in that valley for good.
The young capital was the base from which Menelik II consolidated and expanded the Ethiopian Empire, and from which he led one of the most astonishing episodes in African history: victory over Italy. In 1896, at the Battle of Adwa, the Ethiopian army crushed the Italian troops who meant to turn the country into a colony. It was the first major defeat of a European power by an African state in the era of the colonial scramble, and it secured Ethiopia an independence that made it a symbol for the whole continent and for the African diaspora. The news was celebrated in Addis and cemented Menelik's prestige.
From his new capital, Menelik pushed through a cautious but real modernisation: he had the first telephone and telegraph lines laid, opened schools and hospitals, brought in the motor car and, above all, promoted the railway that would link Addis Ababa with the port of Djibouti, on the coast, across the desert. Opened in sections and completed in 1917, under his successors, the Franco-Ethiopian railway was for decades the country's lifeline to the sea and the engine of its trade. Addis stopped being a camp and became a city with a market (the future Mercato), distinct neighbourhoods, foreign legations and an emerging middle class.
The darkest chapter in Addis Ababa's history came in the 20th century. In 1935-1936, Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia with aircraft and chemical weapons, taking revenge for the humiliation of Adwa. In May 1936, Italian troops entered Addis Ababa and Emperor Haile Selassie went into exile, but not before delivering a famous speech to the League of Nations in Geneva warning that unpunished aggression against Ethiopia was the prelude to a wider war in Europe. The city came under Italian occupation and was absorbed into the short-lived 'Italian East Africa'.
The occupation left a brutal mark. On 19 February 1937, Yekatit 12 in the Ethiopian calendar, after an assassination attempt on the Italian viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, Fascist forces and settlers unleashed days of indiscriminate killing of civilians in Addis Ababa: estimates of the dead range from several thousand to tens of thousands, one of the worst atrocities of Italian colonialism. A monument in the city remembers the victims. The occupation also left less tragic traces that are still visible today: street layouts, buildings, the very name of the Mercato, and a taste for espresso and pasta. In 1941, with British help and the Ethiopian patriots of the resistance, Haile Selassie returned in triumph to his capital and restored independence.
After the war, Haile Selassie made Addis Ababa more than the capital of Ethiopia: he turned it into the symbolic capital of Africa. Drawing on the prestige of being the only African country never truly colonised, the emperor brought the great pan-African institutions to the city. In 1958 the UN Economic Commission for Africa set up there, and in 1963 the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), today the African Union, was founded in Addis, and its headquarters are still in the city. Addis filled up with conferences, embassies and international bodies, and earned the nickname 'diplomatic capital of Africa'.
But Haile Selassie's reign ended in tragedy. The 1973 famine in the north of the country, which the regime covered up, and growing social unrest brought about his fall. In 1974, a committee of low-ranking officers called the Derg deposed the elderly emperor, who died the following year in suspicious circumstances, probably murdered, and proclaimed a Marxist-Leninist regime under Mengistu Haile Mariam. The Derg years were years of terror: the so-called 'Red Terror' of 1977-1978 filled Addis with political executions, and the country sank into civil wars and the devastating 1984-1985 famine that shocked the world. The Derg fell in 1991 to the EPRDF rebels, who entered Addis and opened a new chapter.
Since the 1990s, Addis Ababa has gone through a rapid transformation. The city became the heart of one of Africa's fastest-growing economies: office towers, international hotels, an airport, Bole, that is the continent's biggest air hub thanks to Ethiopian Airlines, and large-scale infrastructure projects. In 2015 the city's light rail opened, the first in sub-Saharan Africa, financed and built with Chinese support, and a new electric railway once again linked Addis with Djibouti, reviving Menelik's old dream in modern form.
The capital is still the political centre of the whole continent: African heads of state meet at its modern African Union headquarters, also built with Chinese funding. At the same time, Addis is a city of huge inequalities, where tin-roofed neighbourhoods sit alongside skyscrapers and urban growth eats into the surrounding countryside. In recent years, renewal plans such as the Corridor project have reshaped avenues and riverbanks, not without controversy over evictions.
For travellers, Addis packs the whole country into a single city: Lucy, the grandmother of humankind, is here; here you drink coffee in its homeland; here centuries-old Orthodox liturgy, Islam, dozens of languages and cultures and a frenetic urban energy all live side by side. Understanding its history, from Taitu's new flower to the capital of Africa, is the best way to start making sense of Ethiopia before heading off to its mountains, its rock-hewn churches and its salt deserts.
