Port Sudan is the city Sudan breathes through. The Anglo-Egyptian administration founded it between 1905 and 1909 to replace the old port of Suakin, which had become too small and too shallow for modern ships. Today it handles around ninety per cent of the country's foreign trade. Everything comes in and goes out through here: containers, grain, livestock, oil, humanitarian aid.
Off its coast lies one of the most famous stretches of reef on the planet. Sanganeb atoll, the only one in the central Red Sea, together with Dungonab Bay and Mukkawar Island, make up Sudan's only natural property on the World Heritage List (since 2016) and the only site of its kind anywhere on the Red Sea. 48 kilometres from the city, on Sha'ab Rumi reef, the remains of Précontinent II still lie on the seabed: the starfish-shaped underwater habitat where Jacques Cousteau had six men live under water for a month in 1963. And a few kilometres from the port lies the Umbria, an Italian cargo ship sunk in 1940 with all its cargo, one of the most famous diveable wrecks in the world.
Since April 2023, though, Port Sudan has become something else: the de facto seat of the Sudanese government, the destination of hundreds of thousands of displaced people, the base for humanitarian agencies and for the embassies moved from Khartoum, and, because of all that, a military target. In May 2025 it was hit by a campaign of drone strikes that went on for consecutive days against fuel depots, the power station and the airport. This guide does not suggest travelling there. It explains what this city is, what its coast holds and what is happening there.
Port Sudan is a planned city. In the early 20th century the Anglo-Egyptian administration decided that Sudan needed a modern deep-water port on the Red Sea, and that Suakin, the old coral harbour that had done the job for a thousand years, could not be pushed any further. Between 1905 and 1909 a new terminal was built from scratch on the bay of Mersa Sheikh Barghut and linked by rail to Atbara and the Nile valley. Suakin emptied, and Port Sudan grew into the country's commercial gateway, with almost four hundred thousand inhabitants in the 2008 census and traffic that accounts for around ninety per cent of Sudan's foreign trade. In 1977 the pipeline linking it to Khartoum was completed, and later came the oil terminal that exports crude from the south. When war broke out in April 2023 and Khartoum became a front line, the government, the international agencies and the embassies moved to Port Sudan. It became the country's de facto capital and, in May 2025, the target of a sustained campaign of drone strikes.
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 Sudanese Red Sea coast has a very long history that predates the city that organises it today. It has been Beja territory for millennia: the people Greco-Roman sources called the Blemmyes, speakers of a Cushitic language, Bidhaawyeet, and organised into large groups — Hadendoa, Beni Amer and others — who for centuries combined camel herding with control of the routes between the Nile and the sea.
The historic port on that coast was Suakin, some fifty or sixty kilometres south of where Port Sudan stands today. From the Middle Ages, and above all under Ottoman rule, Suakin was Africa's great embarkation point for Mecca and the main port of north-east Africa on the Red Sea, with its coral city, its mosques and its multi-storey houses. That was how things worked for centuries: goods from the Sudanese interior came down to the coast by caravan and were shipped out from Suakin.
Suakin's problem was physical. Its harbour is a lagoon reached through a narrow, winding channel, perfect for dhows and lateen-rigged boats but completely unsuited to the deep-draught steamships that dominated trade in the early 20th century. With the Suez Canal open since 1869 and maritime traffic transformed, the old port became obsolete.
The Anglo-Egyptian administration of Sudan, set up after the defeat of the Mahdist State in 1898, made a decision that was both an engineering choice and a political one: instead of trying to dredge and enlarge Suakin, it would build a new deep-water port on a better site. Between 1905 and 1909 Port Sudan went up on the natural bay of Mersa Sheikh Barghut, with docks, warehouses, a grid street plan and administrative buildings with verandas and shutters suited to the humid heat of the Red Sea.
The railway was what made it work. The new city was linked to Atbara, in the Nile valley, and through it to Khartoum and Wadi Halfa, joining the network that had begun to be built in 1897 for military purposes. That port–railway–Nile axis has been Sudan's logistical backbone ever since.
The effect on Suakin was swift and devastating. Within a few years, merchants, officials and residents moved to the new port, the old coral city lost its purpose, and its houses — built from coral blocks quarried from the seabed, a material that deteriorates very quickly once it loses its render and upkeep — began to crumble. Port Sudan was, quite literally, born from the death of Suakin.
Throughout the 20th century the city grew as the country's commercial gateway. In 1977 the pipeline linking it to Khartoum was completed, and later came the oil terminal south of the city, through which crude is exported from the interior and from what is now South Sudan, a country that depends on this infrastructure to get its oil to market. The 2008 census, the last one held in Sudan, put its population at 394.561, mostly Beja, with Nubian, Arab and West African-origin communities.
Off this coast lies one of the best-preserved reef systems on the planet, precisely because almost nobody ever went to see it. While Egypt's Red Sea drew millions of divers a year, the Sudanese coast had only a tiny tourism industry, almost entirely dive liveaboards, and its corals stayed in exceptional condition.
In 2016, UNESCO inscribed Sanganeb Marine National Park on the World Heritage List together with Dungonab Bay – Mukkawar Island Marine National Park. Sanganeb is an isolated coral atoll some 25 kilometres offshore, the only one in the central Red Sea, crowned by a lighthouse; Dungonab and Mukkawar, about 125 kilometres north of Port Sudan, form a mosaic of reefs, mangroves, seagrass beds, beaches and islets that is home to seabirds, marine mammals, sharks, turtles and a remarkable population of manta rays. It is Sudan's only natural property on the List and the only World Heritage site in the entire Red Sea.
Sha'ab Rumi, the “Roman reef”, lies 48 kilometres from the city. Its inner lagoon is reached through a passage that Jacques Cousteau's team blasted open with explosives in 1963. That year, just outside the lagoon, Précontinent II — Conshelf II — was installed as the second phase of Cousteau's underwater habitat experiment: a starfish-shaped structure where six men lived underwater for a month, plus a smaller, deeper cabin that housed two oceanauts for a week. The experiment led to the film “Le monde sans soleil”, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary. The hangar for the diving saucer and other structures are still on the seabed, now colonised by coral.
And then there is the Umbria. Launched in Hamburg in 1911 as the Bahía Blanca, she was bought by the Italian government in 1935 and converted to carry troops and materiel. In June 1940, held off Port Sudan by the British authorities and with Italy about to enter the war, her captain heard on the radio that the declaration was imminent and deliberately scuttled the ship with all her cargo on board; the crew abandoned ship with no casualties. She lies on her side in shallow water beside a reef near the port, with her holds accessible and her hull covered in coral, and she regularly appears on lists of the world's best wreck dives.
Port Sudan is the capital of a region with long-standing grievances. Eastern Sudan — Red Sea State, Kassala and Gedaref — has historically been one of the country's poorest areas on health, education and nutrition indicators, even though almost all the country's foreign trade passes through its port and its land and sea are rich in resources.
That contradiction fuelled Beja-based political and armed movements, such as the Beja Congress, which waged a low-intensity conflict against the central government in the 1990s and 2000s and signed the Eastern Sudan Peace Agreement in Asmara in 2006. The agreement did not resolve the underlying issues, and demands for a fair share of power and resources lived on.
During the transition that followed the fall of Omar al-Bashir, those tensions resurfaced. In 2021, tribal leaders in the east blockaded the port of Port Sudan and the roads to the interior for weeks in protest against the eastern track of the Juba peace agreement, causing fuel and medicine shortages across the country. It was a very vivid reminder of a simple reality: whoever controls Port Sudan controls Sudan's access to the world.
That geopolitical fact also explains the international interest in this coast. Its position on one of the busiest shipping routes on the planet has made Sudan's Red Sea ports the focus of projects and interests from regional and global powers, something that has become more visible since 2023.
On 15 April 2023, fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces turned Khartoum into a battlefield. Within weeks, the government, United Nations agencies and diplomatic missions moved to Port Sudan, which began to function as the country's de facto capital. That role came on top of the ones it already had: main commercial port, main base of the Sudanese navy, air base and — for much of the conflict — the country's only functioning international airport.
The city also became a refuge. Hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people arrived from Khartoum and other combat zones, putting heavy pressure on housing, prices, water and services. And it became a humanitarian logistics hub: most of the aid reaching a country going through one of the world's worst displacement and food insecurity crises comes in through its port.
All of this made it a target. In May 2025, the RSF brought the war to the east of the country for the first time with long-range drone attacks. Between 3 and 9 May, Port Sudan International Airport, fuel depots, ammunition depots, a military base and a power station were hit, as was Kassala airport. A drone struck a fuel depot inside the airport compound and started a fire; the national electricity company reported that the strike on a substation left the city without power. Air traffic was halted at the country's only operational international airport, and international bodies warned of the risk to humanitarian aid deliveries. According to analysis at the time, the drones had reportedly been launched from RSF-controlled areas of Kordofan.
In the wider military picture, the army regained control of Khartoum in March 2025 and consolidated its hold on the centre and east of the country, while the RSF kept control of most of Darfur — where they took El Fasher in October 2025 — and much of Kordofan. In July 2026, a United Nations international fact-finding mission concluded that the RSF's systematic violence in Darfur constitutes genocide, and Amnesty International documented crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing in the El Fasher campaign. The war goes on.
For the region's heritage, the picture is also grim. UNESCO included the Red Sea Museum in Port Sudan among the five Sudanese archaeological museums where it carried out emergency measures — packing and securing collections, setting up safe storage, and cataloguing and digitising around 1.700 objects — alongside those of Kerma, Jebel Barkal, El Damer and Sennar. It is one of the few reasonably good pieces of news from a country where more than twenty museums have been damaged and where the National Museum in Khartoum was looted on a massive scale.
