For many Sudanese, Kassala is the most beautiful city in the country, and one look is enough to see why. The Taka Mountains rise abruptly from a completely flat plain, with no warning and no gradual slope. They are domes of bare granite, shaped like sugarloaves, and they turn red and orange at sunset. At their foot lie the city, its orchards and the sandy bed of the Gash River. The river comes down from the Eritrean highlands, floods violently in summer and vanishes for the rest of the year.
It is also one of the most diverse cities in Sudan. It was founded in the 1830s as an Egyptian military post and grew into a crossroads between the Nile Valley, the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa. Beja, Rashaida, northern Sudanese and Eritrean and Ethiopian communities that settled here decades ago all live side by side. Its market is one of the liveliest in the country, with Rashaida silverwork and fruit from the Gash orchards. At the foot of the mountain stands the shrine of the Khatmiyya, the largest Sufi order in Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia. Its 19th-century mosque was ruined during the Mahdist War and deliberately never rebuilt. The tomb of Sayyid Hasan al-Mirghani lies under an open, roofless dome.
This guide does not suggest travelling here. Sudan has been at war since April 2023, all travel to the country is advised against, and Kassala was hit by drone strikes in May 2025. The city is also under pressure from a huge displaced population. What this guide does is explain what Kassala is, what makes it unique and what situation it is in today.
Kassala began as a military post. The Turco-Egyptian conquest of Sudan began in 1821, and in the 1830s the Egyptian army set up a garrison here, beside the Gash River at the foot of the Taka Mountains. Its job was to control the eastern frontier and the routes to the Red Sea and Abyssinia. Around 1840 the Khatmiyya mosque was built, which made the city the main centre of the largest Sufi order in the region. The building was ruined in the Mahdist War of the 1880s. The order's leaders decided not to repair it, and it remains in ruins today. Kassala was occupied by the Mahdists and later retaken. Italy occupied it from its colony in Eritrea between 1894 and 1897, and again briefly between July 1940 and January 1941, during the Second World War. The railway reached Port Sudan in 1906 and Sennar in 1929, which made Kassala a trading hub of the east. In the 20th century it also became a major farming centre, thanks to the flood irrigation scheme of the Gash Delta. It also became a refuge for successive waves of Eritrean and Ethiopian people.
Read the full history ↓An abandoned coral port, the big port that replaced it and now serves as the capital, and a town of orchards at the foot of granite domes, in the land of the Beja.
Read the history of The Red Sea and the east →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The first thing to understand about Kassala is its landscape, because the landscape explains the city. In eastern Sudan, between the Nile valley and the Eritrean highlands, lies a semi-arid savannah plain that is almost perfectly flat. In the middle of that plain, with no foothills or low hills to give any warning, the Taka Mountains rise all at once. They are domes of bare granite shaped like sugarloaves, and Jebel Totil is the best known of them.
Technically they are inselbergs, or “island mountains”. These are leftover landforms made of especially hard rock, granite in this case. They stayed standing while the softer material around them wore away over millions of years. The process is typical of tropical and semi-arid regions with ancient shield rock, and it produces rounded shapes that meet the plain abruptly, which is what makes them so photogenic. At sunset, when the light comes in low, the granite runs through every shade of ochre, orange and red.
The other part of the landscape is water, and it is just as unusual. The River Gash rises in the Eritrean highlands and flows north-west. During the monsoon, from July to September, it floods violently across the plain. For the rest of the year it disappears, soaking into the ground and leaving a bed of sand. The Gash delta flood irrigation system was built on that seasonal flood. It is one of the most productive traditional farming schemes in Sudan, and it feeds the citrus, mango and guava orchards that Kassala is famous for across the country.
The city sits at about 507 metres above sea level. It has a hot desert climate, with average annual rainfall of about 239 millimetres and extreme heat between April and June. In short, it is a farming oasis at the foot of some improbable mountains, and that is exactly what Sudanese people picture when they think of Kassala.
Kassala is a fairly young city. Muhammad Ali began the Turco-Egyptian conquest of Sudan in 1821, and the Egyptian army then set up fortified posts to control the territory. In the 1830s it founded a garrison beside the River Gash, at the foot of the Taka Mountains. That military settlement is where the city began.
The site was not chosen for its looks. Kassala stands where the routes from the Nile valley to the Red Sea and to the Abyssinian highlands cross. The Gash gives the area water and fertile soil, and the border with what was then Abyssinia is close by. Whoever controlled Taka controlled the east.
At almost the same time, around 1840, the Khatmiyya mosque was built, and this was the city's other decisive founding. The Khatmiyya, also called the Mirghaniyya, is a Sufi order founded in the late 18th century by Muhammad Uthman al-Mirghani al-Khatim. He was a disciple of the Idrisi school who travelled the region preaching and made the Taka area one of the order's main centres. The Mirghani family settled between Kassala and Suakin and made the order the largest in Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
The shrine brought pilgrims, students and donations, and Kassala grew from a barracks into a city. From the start, its character came from that mix of garrison, border market and religious centre.
The Mahdist uprising that broke out in 1881 swept away the old order across Sudan, and Kassala was no exception. The city fell to the Mahdists, and in the 1880s the Khatmiyya mosque was wrecked. This was not just any collateral damage. The Khatmiyya was the main religious rival of the Mahdi's movement. The rivalry between the Ansar, the Mahdi's followers, and the Mirghani has been one of the deep fault lines in Sudanese politics ever since.
The order later chose not to repair the building, and the mosque was left as it stood. The prayer hall is open to the sky, the colonnades are still standing and the octagonal minaret with its pointed top is still in place. Beside the mosque is the tomb of Sayyid Hasan al-Mirghani, who died in 1869 and is credited with spreading much of the order's teaching. His dome has no roof. That deliberate ruin is now one of the most symbolically charged places in Sudan.
In 1894, Italian troops from the colony of Eritrea occupied Kassala, as European colonial powers pushed into a Sudan under Mahdist control. The occupation lasted until 1897. The city then returned to Anglo-Egyptian hands, just before the reconquest campaign that ended at Omdurman in 1898.
Under the Anglo-Egyptian condominium, Kassala grew into a trading and farming centre. The railway linked it to Port Sudan in 1906 and to Sennar in 1929, connecting it to the national network. In 1940, during the Second World War, it changed hands again. Italian forces in East Africa crossed the border in July and occupied the city. The British took it back in January 1941, at the start of the campaign that would end the Italian empire in the Horn of Africa.
Kassala is probably the Sudanese city where the most worlds meet. Its core population is Beja, made up of the Hadendoa, the Beni Amer and other groups. The Beja are one of the oldest documented peoples of north-east Africa and are identified with the Blemmyes of Greek and Roman sources. They speak a Cushitic language, Bidhaawyeet, and have a long history of camel herding and of controlling the routes between the Nile and the sea.
The Rashaida arrived in the mid-19th century. They are a group of Arab origin who migrated from the Arabian Peninsula, and they keep a very distinct identity: black tents, camels, long embroidered veils for women and a tradition of silverwork. That silverwork is now the most sought-after craft in eastern Sudan and one of the draws of Kassala's market.
Over the 20th century they were joined by Sudanese from the Nile valley, drawn by farming and trade, and by successive waves of Eritreans and Ethiopians. The Eritrean war of independence and the later conflicts in the Horn of Africa made eastern Sudan one of the longest-standing refugee-hosting regions in Africa. Some camps around Kassala are decades old, and for many Eritrean and Ethiopian families the city is simply home.
In the same state, a few hundred kilometres away, is New Halfa, near Khashm el Girba. It was built in 1964 to resettle about 50,000 Nubians displaced from Wadi Halfa by the reservoir of the Aswan Dam. They were moved more than a thousand kilometres from their valley and settled on an irrigated farming scheme. It is a Nubian community transplanted to the east, and it still speaks Nobiin.
All of this comes together in a market, a cuisine and a social life that blend Sudanese, Eritrean and Ethiopian influences. It also comes together in the coffee ritual, the local form of hospitality, where the coffee is roasted, ground and boiled with ginger on the spot.
War broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces on 15 April 2023. The east of the country was far from the main front lines, which were in Khartoum, Darfur and Kordofan. So Kassala became what it had been so many times before: a refuge.
The state took in a huge number of internally displaced people from Khartoum and later from Gezira. Nationally, the International Organization for Migration put the total number of internally displaced people in Sudan at more than nine million in its March 2025 report. That report also recorded the first fall since the conflict began, of around 2.4%, linked to people returning home. The drops were seen in Kassala, Gedaref, Red Sea, Northern, River Nile and other states. The IOM has offices in Kassala, as well as in Port Sudan, Atbara and Wadi Halfa, and runs a migrant health assessment centre in the city itself.
The city was already stretched when the displaced arrived. Housing, water, healthcare, schools and food prices were all under pressure, in a country where food insecurity had reached emergency levels across large areas.
Kassala's relative distance from the fighting ended in May 2025. Between 3 and 9 May, the RSF used long-range drones to bring the war to eastern Sudan for the first time. Kassala airport and its fuel depots were hit. The same campaign struck Port Sudan's airport, fuel depots, a military base and its power station on several days in a row. It was the first time the conflict had reached the city directly since it began in 2023.
Kassala is not a travel destination today. Foreign ministries advise against all travel to Sudan and urge their citizens to leave the country. Spain has also suspended public services at its embassy in Khartoum, so there is no consular assistance on the ground. What still stands is the granite domes, the ruined Khatmiyya shrine, the Gash orchards, the market and a society that has spent two centuries taking in people fleeing from something. That is why Sudanese people still talk about Kassala as the most beautiful city in the country.
