Berbera is the port through which almost everything leaving or entering the Somali north passed for two thousand years: frankincense and myrrh to the Mediterranean, slaves and ivory to Arabia, coffee and hides from the Ethiopian highlands, live cattle to the Gulf, pilgrims to Mecca. It was an Ottoman base, an Egyptian outpost, the capital of the British protectorate and, in the seventies, a Soviet naval base. Later it became a US base, and its runway of more than four kilometres —one of the longest in Africa— was leased by NASA as an emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle.
What remains of all that is a strange, magnetic city: an old town of coral-stone houses with carved wooden doors, centuries-old mosques, Ottoman and British ruins half eaten away by the 1988 war and by the salt air; a fishing port with its market and restaurants; and, on the other side, a strip of white sand and turquoise water with reefs just a few metres from the shore.
And there is a new Berbera. Since 2016, the DP World concession and Ethiopia's interest in access to the sea have turned the port into Somaliland's big economic bet and a piece of Red Sea geopolitics. Cranes, containers and a paved corridor into the interior sit alongside the coral ruins. This guide explains how to get there, what to see, what it costs, when to go —the heat is no minor detail— and what to expect from a place that is changing fast.
Berbera is one of the oldest continuously used ports in the Horn of Africa: it is usually identified with the Malao of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, the Greek sailing manual of the 1st century AD, and for centuries it was the sea outlet for the Somali interior and the Ethiopian highlands. Its famous annual fair drew tens of thousands of people and ships from Arabia, India and the Persian Gulf. It came under Ottoman influence from the early 19th century, passed briefly to the Khedivate of Egypt in 1875 and in 1884 came under British control: it was the capital of the British Somaliland protectorate from 1884 until 1941, when the British moved the government to Hargeisa. In the seventies, the Soviet Union built a naval and air base there with a gigantic runway to counter the United States; after the switch in alliances during the Ogaden War, the facility passed into US hands and NASA leased the runway as an emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle between 1980 and 1991. The city was devastated in the war of the late eighties and rebuilt after Somaliland's de facto independence in 1991. Since 2016, the port concession to DP World and Ethiopia's arrival as a partner have put it back at the centre of the regional board.
Read the full history ↓From the Gulf of Aden to the 2,400 metres of Cal Madow: ports that appear in the Greek Periplus, Zeila's mosque of the two qiblas, an airstrip built by the Soviets and the world's last great frankincense forest.
Read the history of Somaliland: the coast and the northern mountains →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, the Greek sailing manual written around the 1st century AD by an anonymous merchant from Alexandria, describes a string of ports along the northern Somali coast where ships loaded frankincense, myrrh, cinnamon, ivory, tortoiseshell and slaves in exchange for cloth, glass, iron and wine. One of them, Malao, is usually identified with Berbera. The same work calls this coast “the country of Barbaria” and its people “Berberoi”, a root that survives in the city's present-day name.
What made the place valuable was its geography. Berbera has one of the few naturally sheltered bays on a very long and hostile coastline, and it sits directly opposite Aden and the Yemeni coast, on the route linking the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea through the Bab el-Mandeb strait. Behind it, the Golis Mountains open the way to the Somali pastoral interior and, beyond that, to the Ethiopian highlands with their coffee, hides and ivory. For centuries Berbera was the hinge between those two worlds.
The most spectacular expression of that role was the Berbera annual fair. Between October and April, when the monsoon allowed it, the city filled with caravans from Harar and the Somali interior and with ships from Arabia, the Persian Gulf and India. Nineteenth-century accounts describe a seasonal population of tens of thousands who put up a town of mats beside the stone one and took it down again when the wind changed. The British explorer Richard Burton, who travelled through the region in 1854-1855 and wrote about it in “First Footsteps in East Africa”, is one of the classic sources on that trade.
The old town survives from that era: two-storey houses built from coral and limestone blocks, flat roofs designed to collect rainwater, small windows to keep the interiors cool, solid wooden doors carved with geometric patterns, and hidden inner courtyards. Most of the buildings you see today date from between the early 19th century and 1880, and they belong to the same architectural family as Lamu, Zanzibar and Suakin: the coral-stone architecture of the western Indian Ocean.
In the early 19th century, Berbera came into the Ottoman orbit. Building work from that period is still identifiable in the old town: arches, load-bearing walls with lime roofs, and stone masonry with clay mortars reinforced by lengthwise timbers. The complex around the so-called Turkish Mosque, from about 1840, is one of the clearest examples.
In 1875 the Khedivate of Egypt, then expanding along the Red Sea and into the Horn of Africa under Ismail Pasha, occupied Berbera and ran it for a short time. The Egyptian venture didn't last: the financial crisis in Cairo and the Mahdist revolt in Sudan forced a withdrawal from the Somali coast in the early 1880s.
The British filled that gap. Established in Aden since 1839, they needed a steady supply of fresh meat for their garrison (the Somali coast was quite literally Aden's livestock pen) and wanted to stop any other European power from settling opposite the route to India, which had become vital after the Suez Canal opened in 1869. Between 1884 and 1888, London signed protection treaties with the clans of northern Somalia and set up the British Somaliland protectorate, with Berbera as its capital.
It was a bare-minimum colony. The British ran the territory first from India and later from London, with very little investment and no development plan at all: what they wanted was the livestock and the strategic position, not the land. Berbera remained the port, the seat of government and the only town with any infrastructure until well into the 20th century. In 1941, after retaking the protectorate from a brief Italian occupation in 1940, the British moved the capital to Hargeisa, in the highlands, for a more bearable climate. Berbera lost its administrative status but kept its port.
After independence in 1960 and the union with Italian Somaliland, and above all after Mohamed Siad Barre's coup in 1969, Somalia sided with the Soviet Union. Berbera became the most prized asset of that alliance. In the mid-1970s the Soviets built a naval and air base there, with missile storage facilities and a runway of about 4,140 metres. It was one of the longest in Africa, designed to handle heavy aircraft at any temperature and altitude.
The deal fell apart abruptly. The Ethiopian revolution of 1974 brought a Marxist regime to power in Addis Ababa, and when Somalia invaded Ethiopia's Ogaden region in 1977, Moscow had to choose. It chose Ethiopia. Somalia expelled its Soviet advisers and looked for a new patron, and in the early 1980s the United States gained access to the Berbera facilities. The roles had flipped: the Soviets took over the old American positions in Ethiopia, and the Americans inherited the Soviet base in Somalia.
That switch produced the most improbable fact in the city's history. Because of its exceptional length and location, NASA leased the Berbera runway as an emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle, for about 40 million dollars a year according to the most widely cited sources. It held that status from 1980 to 1991, until Siad Barre's regime collapsed. No shuttle ever landed there, but for eleven years a city on the Gulf of Aden was on the list of possible destinations for an American spacecraft. Beside the airport access road you can still see the mud-brick shells of the old Soviet barracks.
The late 1980s swept almost everything away. The Somali National Movement's 1988 offensive and the Siad Barre regime's brutal crackdown on the people of the north also reached Berbera. That crackdown is known as the Isaaq genocide and included the systematic destruction of Hargeisa and Burao. The fighting and the neglect that followed left the old town in ruins: many of the British and Ottoman buildings you now see half collapsed ended up that way back then, and salt and sun did the rest over the following decades.
After the regime fell in 1991 and Somaliland declared independence, Berbera went back to being what it had always been: the port. Live livestock exports to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, millions of sheep, goats and camels each season, became the mainstay of the new de facto state's economy, along with remittances from the diaspora. For twenty-five years, though, the port infrastructure stayed basic.
The change came in 2016, when the Emirati operator DP World signed a concession agreement worth about 442 million dollars to develop and run the port. The second phase of the expansion, completed in 2021, raised capacity to two million TEU a year, and a land corridor towards the Ethiopian interior was added. In 2018, Ethiopia acquired a 19% stake in the project, and in January 2024 it signed an agreement to use the terminal. With more than a hundred million people, Ethiopia has been landlocked since Eritrea became independent.
That move carries huge political weight. In January 2024, Addis Ababa and Hargeisa also announced a memorandum of understanding under which Ethiopia would gain access to a stretch of Somaliland's coast. According to Somaliland's statements, the price was eventual recognition as a state. The announcement set off a diplomatic crisis with Mogadishu and fierce controversy at home. In Somaliland, Berbera is no longer just a port: it's the main bargaining chip of a territory that has spent more than three decades trying to exist in the eyes of the world.
While the cranes rise over the port, less than a kilometre away one of the most remarkable groups of coral-stone architecture on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden is falling apart. Berbera's old town brings together Ottoman buildings from the first half of the 19th century, merchant houses from the days of the annual fair, mosques that are centuries old and British administrative buildings. Its value is anything but minor: it is a built archive of every hand that passed through the city.
The threats are many and well known. They include damage from the war of the late 1980s, salt and sea humidity, extreme heat, decades of neglect, a shortage of workers skilled in traditional techniques, and pressure from the new construction that the port boom brings. On top of that comes the same structural obstacle that affects Laas Geel: since Somaliland is not recognised, it cannot use the mechanisms of the World Heritage Convention or submit nominations to UNESCO.
The response has come by indirect routes. In recent years, conservation projects for historic buildings have got under way, along with plans for a local museum, backed by occasional international technical help. The British consultancy M Womersleys, for example, documented support work at the Berbera museum in late 2024. These are modest efforts next to the size of the problem, but they point the way: train local people in conservation and give the city an institution of its own to look after its memory.
For the visitor, then, Berbera reads as three overlapping layers. The first is thousands of years old: an Indian Ocean port that showed up in Greek sailing manuals. The second is imperial and Cold War: Ottomans, Egyptians, the British, the Soviets and the Americans, each leaving their own ruin behind. The third is the present: containers, logistics corridors and an ongoing geopolitical negotiation. All of that fits into a city of two hundred thousand-odd people where it's 40 degrees.
