Harar is a world apart. Behind its stone wall, in the old town known as Jugol, lies a maze of narrow alleys, whitewashed houses painted in bright colours, centuries-old mosques and markets piled high with spices, coffee and khat. Considered by many Muslims the fourth holiest city in Islam, with nearly a hundred mosques and dozens of shrines in barely one square kilometre, Harar is one of the great centres of Islamic culture in Africa, and one of the most unusual and fascinating cities in all of Ethiopia.
But if Harar is famous worldwide for one thing, it's its hyenas. Every night, outside the walls, the 'hyena man' calls by name the wild hyenas that come down from the hills and feeds them by hand —and by mouth—, in a ritual that goes back generations and lives alongside the legend that well-fed hyenas keep evil spirits at bay and protect the city. Watching these animals approach in the torchlight, docile before the man who knows them, is one of the most intense and strangest experiences Africa has to offer.
Harar also has a rich, cosmopolitan history: it was the capital of an Islamic sultanate, the birthplace of Ahmad 'Gragn''s jihad against the Christian Ethiopian kingdom, an independent city that minted its own coins, a stronghold occupied by Egypt and, in the 19th century, the refuge of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who gave up poetry for trade here. This guide covers Harar with a practical and respectful eye: how to get around Jugol, which mosques, museums and markets to see, how to experience the hyena ritual and how to get there from Dire Dawa. With real prices verified in July 2026 and in Ethiopian birr.
Harar is one of the most important historic cities of Islam in Africa. Founded as an urban centre around the 10th-13th centuries, it became a major centre of trade, culture and Islamic learning, and in the 16th century it was the base of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, nicknamed 'Gragn' ('the left-handed'), who launched a devastating war against the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia from here. Surrounded by its protective wall (Jugol), it was an independent emirate that minted its own coins, came under Egyptian rule in 1875 and was finally incorporated into the Ethiopian empire by Menelik II in 1887. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 2006. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Ethiopia in all its diversity: the ancestral peoples of the Omo, the holy Muslim city of Harar and the Afro-alpine heights of Bale.
Read the history of The south and the east (Omo Valley, Harar, Bale) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
On a hilltop in the eastern highlands of Ethiopia, between the Christian plateau and the deserts that run down towards the Red Sea and Somalia, grew one of the most remarkable cities of African Islam. Harar was not founded by an emperor or an army: it grew up as a crossroads, a place where the caravans linking the Ethiopian interior with the coastal ports (Zeila, Berbera) stopped to trade coffee, ivory, slaves, hides and cloth. Islam reached this region very early, almost in the first centuries of the faith, and Harar became a beacon of culture and religious learning.
Between the 10th and 13th centuries it took shape as an urban centre, and by the Middle Ages it was already an important hub of trade, Quranic scholarship and Sufi spirituality. The city developed a very strong identity of its own: its language, Harari or Adare, different from the Amharic and Oromo spoken around it; its architecture of whitewashed houses and decorated courtyards; its cuisine; its calendar of religious festivals. With nearly a hundred mosques and hundreds of shrines to Sufi saints and teachers packed into a tiny space, Harar came to be regarded by many Muslims as the fourth holiest city of Islam, after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, a place of pilgrimage and study.
Its wealth also made it vulnerable, which is why it surrounded itself with a wall. The old town, Jugol, was enclosed by a ring of stone about four kilometres long with five gates, each facing a caravan route. Inside that perimeter a compact, refined urban civilisation developed, a world closed in on itself that kept its character for centuries.
The 16th century brought Harar its most dramatic and decisive moment. In the first half of that century, the city became the base of the Adal Sultanate and the epicentre of one of the most devastating wars in the history of the Horn of Africa. From Harar, the military and religious leader Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, known to Ethiopians as 'Gragn' ('the left-handed'), launched a jihad against the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia from the 1520s onwards, with an army that combined local forces with muskets and cannons supplied by the Ottoman Empire.
Ahmad Gragn's campaign laid waste to much of the Christian Ethiopian highlands: it burned churches and monasteries, destroyed treasures and manuscripts and came close to ending the Solomonic kingdom. Cornered, the Ethiopian emperor asked the Portuguese crown for help, and it sent a contingent of soldiers led by Cristóvão da Gama (son of the navigator Vasco da Gama). The war was finally settled in 1543, when Ahmad Gragn died in battle and his forces scattered. It was a conflict that left both kingdoms, Christian and Muslim, exhausted and scarred for centuries.
After Gragn's death, Harar remained the capital of an emirate in retreat, under growing pressure from the migrations and expansion of the Oromo people, who were spreading across the region. To protect it from these raids the Jugol wall was strengthened; its current form is attributed to Emir Nur ibn Mujahid, Ahmad Gragn's successor and relative, around the middle of the 16th century. Under Nur, Harar turned inwards, walled itself in and became the fortress city that has survived to this day.
Through the 17th, 18th and much of the 19th centuries, Harar was an independent emirate, a small city-state that governed itself behind its walls. From 1647, a local dynasty founded by Emir Ali ibn Da'ud ruled the city with considerable autonomy. In its isolation, Harar developed an exceptionally strong identity: it was one of the few places in the world that minted its own currency, a clear sign of its status as a sovereign entity; it had its own language, religious literature, architecture and traditions.
It was also a deeply closed city, wary of outsiders, especially Christians. For centuries, non-Muslims were forbidden to spend the night inside the walls, and Europeans were not allowed in at all. The British explorer Richard Francis Burton, famous for his travels in Arabia and Africa, became in 1855 one of the first Europeans to enter the forbidden city and leave alive, a feat he described in his book 'First Footsteps in East Africa'. His account introduced the West to the mystery of this walled city in the African interior.
Life in Harar revolved around long-distance trade (coffee above all, but also khat, ivory, hides and textiles), religion and scholarship. The city was a bustling, cosmopolitan place where Hararis, Oromo, Somalis, Arabs and Indians met, brought together by Islam and by business. That mix left a very rich cultural legacy, still visible today in its architecture, cuisine and music.
Harar's independence came to an end in the last quarter of the 19th century, amid the imperial expansion that was shaking all of north-east Africa. In 1875, troops from Ottoman Egypt, then pushing southwards, occupied the city and ended the independent emirate. The Egyptian occupation lasted about a decade (until 1885) and, though short, left its mark: administrative reforms, some new buildings and a greater opening of the city to the outside world.
It was in this context, with Harar open to international trade, that one of its most famous and puzzling residents appeared: the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. A poetic prodigy, Rimbaud had given up literature while still very young and, after years of wandering, landed in Harar around 1880 as an agent for trading houses in Aden dealing in coffee, hides, musk and also weapons. He lived in the city, on and off, until 1891, when a serious illness in his leg forced him to return to France, where he died shortly afterwards. Rimbaud was one of the first people to photograph Harar, and his time there turned the walled city in the Ethiopian interior into an unexpected place of literary pilgrimage; today a striking mansion (actually built after his death) bears his name and serves as a museum.
Harar's fate was sealed in 1887. That year, King Menelik II of Shewa (later emperor of Ethiopia and the unifier of the modern country) defeated the last emir, Abdullahi, at the Battle of Chelenqo and conquered the city, bringing it permanently into the Ethiopian empire. Menelik appointed his cousin and trusted ally Ras Makonnen as governor; Makonnen was the father of the future emperor Haile Selassie, who in fact spent part of his childhood in Harar. With the conquest, the holy, independent city became just another possession of the Christian Ethiopian empire, though it kept its Muslim character and its own identity.
Under the Ethiopian empire, and later under the republic, Harar stopped being a capital and became a regional city, but it never lost its uniqueness. In the 20th century it grew beyond its walls: a new town developed next to old Jugol, and the arrival of the railway in nearby Dire Dawa, on the line linking Addis Ababa with the port of Djibouti, shifted part of the trade to its neighbour, leaving Harar as a historic treasure somewhat off the main routes.
That relative isolation had a positive side: Jugol kept its urban fabric, its Harari houses, its mosques and its traditional way of life almost intact. In 2006, UNESCO recognised this outstanding value by inscribing 'Harar Jugol, the Fortified Historic Town' on the World Heritage List, highlighting it as an outstanding example of a historic Islamic city in the Horn of Africa, with its urban layout, religious heritage and living culture. For many, it is the oldest and most important living city of Islam in this part of Africa.
Today Harar is both an open-air museum and a fully living community: its residents pray in the same mosques as ever, trade coffee and khat in the same markets, decorate their homes as they have for generations and, every night, a man still feeds the hyenas outside the walls, in a ritual that sums up the unique character of this city where the sacred and the wild live side by side without fuss. Like the rest of eastern Ethiopia, Harar is not immune to the region's political and security tensions, so it is worth checking the situation before you travel; but its fascination remains intact, that of a walled city that has kept its soul for more than a thousand years.
