Suakin is one of the strangest and most beautiful ruins in Africa: an island inside a Red Sea lagoon, entirely covered by the remains of a city built from coral blocks. The houses rose up to four storeys, with carved wooden balconies, teak doors brought from Java and carved stone lintels. When the sun hits it full on, the whitewashed coral gives off a blinding white: hence the nickname “the white city”.
For centuries, Suakin was the great port of north-east Africa. Gold, ivory, gum arabic, livestock and also slaves left from here; and, above all, Muslim pilgrims who had crossed the Sahel and Sudan sailed from here on their way to Mecca. The Ottomans took it in the mid-16th century and made it the capital of their African province on the Red Sea; the British used it as a base during the wars against the Mahdi, and the garrison commanded by Kitchener held out through a long siege there.
Its end came through technical obsolescence: the channel into the lagoon was too narrow and shallow for modern steamships, and between 1905 and 1909 the British built Port Sudan, sixty kilometres to the north. Within a few years the city emptied and the coral, left unmaintained, began to crumble. This guide does not suggest travelling —Sudan has been at war since April 2023 and all travel is advised against—, but tells what Suakin was, what is left of it and who is trying to save it.
Suakin is one of the oldest ports in Africa: it is usually identified with the “Harbour of Good Hope” mentioned by Ptolemy. In the late 14th century, under Hadendoa control, it became the most important port of north-east Africa on the Red Sea. After the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, Özdemir Pasha occupied it in the early 1550s and the Ottomans made it a provincial centre: they restored its two great mosques, strengthened the walls and put up new buildings, and used it to protect the Hejaz route from the Portuguese and from pirates. In 1865 it passed to the administration of the Egyptian Khedivate and, between 1883 and 1885, it was a British base in the wars against the Mahdist State: Herbert Kitchener, in command of the Egyptian contingent, had his headquarters there and his force withstood a long siege by the troops of Emir Osman Digna. The final verdict came from engineering: the port was useless for modern steamships, and between 1905 and 1909 Port Sudan was built. Suakin emptied, and its coral houses —without render or upkeep— collapsed within a few decades.
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.
Suakin is one of the oldest ports in Africa. The most commonly repeated identification places it as the “Port of Good Hope” mentioned by Ptolemy in the 2nd century, and its lagoon appears on Red Sea routes from Antiquity onwards: an inner bay of sheltered waters, with an island in the middle and a narrow access channel that protected it from the winds and from intruders.
The name has fuelled legends. The most sober explanation derives it from the Arabic suq, “market”, which fits its historical role perfectly. Local popular tradition, on the other hand, tells a story of jinn imprisoned on the island, a tale that has circulated for centuries among sailors and pilgrims and is part of the place's mythology.
In the Middle Ages, Suakin established itself as the point where the African interior met the maritime trade of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Towards the end of the 14th century, with the coast under the control of the Hedareb group, it became the most important port of north-east Africa on this shore. Gold, ivory, gum arabic, hides, livestock and also slaves went out through it, while textiles, spices, ceramics and manufactured goods from India, Arabia and the Mediterranean came in.
And, above all, pilgrims went out. For centuries Suakin was Africa's great embarkation point for the pilgrimage to Mecca: people who crossed the Sahel from West and Central Africa, traversed Sudan on foot or by camel on a journey that could last years, and reached this coast to cross the sea to Jeddah. That flow left a lasting demographic mark on eastern Sudan, where many communities descend from pilgrims who stayed along the way.
After the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, the empire extended its control over the Red Sea to secure the route to the Hejaz — the holy places of Islam — against the Portuguese, who had burst into the Indian Ocean, and against piracy. In the early 1550s, Özdemir Pasha occupied Suakin, which became an Ottoman provincial centre.
The Ottomans invested in the city: they restored its two great mosques — the Shafi'i and the Hanafi, whose coexistence speaks to the port's cosmopolitan character — strengthened the fort's walls and put up new buildings and streets. Suakin served as the Ottoman administrative seat on this African shore until 1865, when it was transferred to the administration of the Egyptian Khedivate.
The look that made Suakin famous dates from that period. Its buildings were made of madrepore, blocks of coral taken from the seabed: houses of up to four storeys, with large wooden latticework bay windows — the roshan, which let people see the street without being seen and ventilated the interior — doors of teak brought from Java and carved stone lintels. Whitewashed coral, under the Red Sea sun, gives off a blinding white; hence the nickname “the white city”.
That material has a cruel downside. Coral is light, insulating and easy to work, but it needs a lime render and constant maintenance to keep from crumbling. While Suakin was inhabited and prosperous, the houses held up. As soon as it emptied, they fell down.
In 1881, the revolt of Muhammad Ahmad — the Mahdi — against the Turco-Egyptian administration spread across Sudan. In the east, the emir Osman Digna, a Suakin merchant who became one of the movement's most effective military leaders, raised the Beja Hadendoa against the established authorities and turned this coast into a war front.
Suakin became the stronghold that did not fall. Between 1883 and 1885 the British army operated from the port: Herbert Kitchener, then in command of the Egyptian army contingent, had his headquarters there, and his force withstood a prolonged siege by Osman Digna's forces. The eastern campaign produced several of the war's most remembered battles — El Teb and Tamai in 1884, Tofrek in 1885 — as well as the failed attempt to build a railway from Suakin to Berber, on the Nile, to open a corridor into the interior.
Those years wrote Suakin into British literature and imperial memory. Rudyard Kipling wrote about the Hadendoa, whose hairstyles earned them the nickname that stuck in the Victorian imagination, and the eastern campaign became one of the canonical episodes of the 19th-century colonial wars.
After the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of Sudan in 1898, Suakin was incorporated into the new condominium regime. The British military presence in the town lasted for decades, until the withdrawal in the 1920s. But by then the city had already lost its reason for being.
Suakin's death sentence was signed not by an army but by naval engineering. The port is a lagoon reached through a narrow, winding channel: a marvel for the dhows and lateen-rigged sailing boats that had dominated Red Sea trade for a thousand years, and a dead end for the large, deep-draught steamships that took over after the Suez Canal opened in 1869.
The Anglo-Egyptian administration ran the numbers and decided to build a new port from scratch. Between 1905 and 1909, Port Sudan was built some sixty kilometres to the north, with deep-water docks, warehouses and a rail link to Atbara and the Nile valley. The effect was immediate: merchants, officials and whole families moved to the new port, and Suakin emptied within a few years.
From then on, the city literally crumbled. With no inhabitants to repair the render, the coral disintegrated; roofs gave way, façades collapsed, the streets filled with white rubble. The remaining population moved to El Geyf, the mainland settlement on the other side of the causeway, which had 18.030 inhabitants in 1983 and had reached 82.150 by the 2008 census. The island was left uninhabited.
The result today is one of the strangest urban landscapes in Africa: a dead city of white coral facing a living one, separated by an isthmus a few hundred metres wide. In the lagoon, a rusting freighter stranded on a sandbank and a handful of fishing boats complete the scene.
Suakin has been drifting in and out of rescue plans for a century. Since 1994 it has been on the World Heritage Tentative List that Sudan submitted to UNESCO, along with Kerma and Old Dongola, and it has been the subject of international conservation studies because of its exceptional architectural value and extreme material fragility.
The most ambitious project came in December 2017, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited Sudan and toured the island with then-President Omar al-Bashir. In January 2018, the Turkish cooperation agency TIKA launched restoration work under a 99-year lease agreement, with the stated aim of turning Suakin into a tourist centre and a service hub for pilgrims bound for Mecca. The old governor's palace, the customs building and the two 16th-century Ottoman mosques were restored. The agreement drew considerable international attention, because the Red Sea has become a stage for competition between regional powers, and Ankara stressed that its presence on the island was for civilian purposes. The project stalled after 2019, with Bashir's fall and the change of government in Khartoum.
On 15 April 2023, war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, and everything else took a back seat. Suakin has not seen fighting — the main fronts were Khartoum, Darfur and Kordofan — but the east of the country was drawn into the war in May 2025, when the RSF launched long-range drone attacks on Port Sudan and Kassala. The region is also home to a huge displaced population and an economy in deep crisis.
And yet work goes on in Suakin. A Sudanese team linked to the Safeguarding Sudan's Living Heritage from Conflict and Climate Change (SSLH) initiative, funded by the British Council and supported by UNESCO, has resumed the restoration of a mosque that houses the tomb of a Sufi sheikh, using traditional building techniques that are hardly practised any more and training architecture students in them. The team has said it intends to hold a traditional music festival when the work is finished, and has expressed the hope that one day, with peace, visitors will be able to walk through these buildings again.
That is probably the best summary of what Suakin is today: a ruin of white coral that keeps falling down, where a handful of people work with lime and wood while the country is at war.
