Yemen

Southern Arabia was the land the Romans called Arabia Felix, "Fortunate Arabia", rich from the trade in frankincense and myrrh and from control of the sea route to India. The kingdom of Saba (biblical Sheba) built the great dam at Marib around the eighth century BC, and its collapse centuries later passed into legend. Judaism and Christianity took root before Islam arrived in the seventh century, and a Zaydi Shia imamate was established in the northern highlands around 897, ruling in various forms for over a thousand years.

The Ottomans held parts of Yemen intermittently, and Britain seized the port of Aden in 1839 as a coaling station on the route to India, developing it into a major harbour and, later, a protectorate over the surrounding sultanates. In 1962 a coup and civil war ended the imamate in the north, creating the Yemen Arab Republic; when Britain withdrew from Aden in 1967, the south became the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, the only Marxist state in the Arab world. The two Yemens united in 1990 under Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had led the north, though a southern secession attempt in 1994 was crushed.

Saleh's three-decade rule ended in 2011–12 amid Arab Spring protests. The Houthi movement — Zaydi revivalists from the far north — swept into Sana'a in 2014–15, and a Saudi-led coalition intervened to restore the internationally recognised government, with Iran backing the Houthis. The war has killed an estimated 150,000 people in fighting and hundreds of thousands more through hunger and disease, displaced millions, split the country between Houthi-run north and west and government- and southern-separatist-held south and east, and produced what the UN has repeatedly called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Yemen is tribal, conservative, and deeply religious, split between a Zaydi Shia tradition in the northern highlands and a Shafi'i Sunni majority elsewhere. Tribal law and mediation remain powerful, especially outside the cities, and the carrying of the jambiya, a curved dagger worn at the belt, is a mark of manhood and status for many northern men.

Hospitality is a strong obligation, and the qat chew — a long communal afternoon session in which men (and, separately, some women) chew the leaves of the mildly narcotic Catha edulis — is the central social ritual, despite the enormous toll it takes on water, farmland, family budgets, and productivity.

Yemeni craft and building traditions are distinctive: the multi-storey tower-houses of rammed earth, brick, and white gypsum tracery in Sana'a and Shibam, silverwork, and honey production, with Yemeni sidr honey among the most prized in the world. Socotra has its own Soqotri language and a herding and date-farming culture shaped by centuries of isolation.

Around 35 million people live in Yemen, and the war has left the great majority dependent on humanitarian aid, with more than half the population facing acute food insecurity and millions displaced. The economy has largely collapsed: public salaries often go unpaid, the currency has fractured, fuel and cooking gas are scarce and expensive, and basic services barely function.

Water is the country's deepest structural problem — Yemen was already one of the most water-stressed nations on Earth, and qat cultivation consumes much of what remains. In the towns and cities, life means queuing, power cuts, rising prices, and the constant background of conflict; in the countryside, subsistence farming and herding continue under the same strains.

Socotra, though poor and cut off, has been comparatively calm, its people living by fishing, herding goats, growing dates, and, increasingly, guiding the small number of tourists who fly in.

Yemeni cuisine is rich and spiced. The national dish is saltah: a bubbling lamb or beef stew served in a stone pot, topped with hulba, a whipped fenugreek froth, and eaten with flatbread. Fahsa is a similar shredded-meat stew, and mandi — meat and rice cooked together in a pit oven — is the celebration dish, shared from a communal platter.

Bread comes in many forms, from the tandoor-baked khubz to the layered, buttery malooj and the giant lahoh pancake. Aseed (a stiff dough dipped in broth), shafut (flatbread in spiced buttermilk), and zurbian (spiced meat and rice) round out the table. The sweet bint al-sahn, thin layered pastry soaked in honey and clarified butter, is served with black seed.

Coffee is Yemen's gift to the world — the port of Mokha gave its name to the drink — and the husks are brewed as a spiced infusion called qishr. Sweet black tea is drunk all day, and the afternoon belongs to qat.

Yemen's cultural sites are among the most striking anywhere and are, for the most part, currently unreachable. The old walled city of Sana'a, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a dense quarter of decorated tower-houses, mosques, and bustan gardens, inhabited for more than 2,500 years. Shibam, in the Hadhramaut, is a grid of 16th-century mud-brick tower blocks five to eleven storeys high, often called the "Manhattan of the desert" and also UNESCO-listed, as is the coastal town of Zabid, once a great centre of Islamic learning.

Elsewhere the mainland holds the Marib dam and Sabaean temple ruins, the cliff palace of Dar al-Hajar near Sana'a, the terraced highland villages of the Haraz Mountains, the wadi oasis towns of the Hadhramaut, and the port and volcanic crater of Aden.

Socotra is the one part of Yemen that receives visitors: a UNESCO-listed island with a third of its plant life found nowhere else, including the umbrella-crowned dragon's blood tree and swollen-trunked bottle trees, along with white dunes climbing red cliffs at Arher, the freshwater lagoon of Detwah, limestone caves, and empty beaches, all seen on camping trips by 4x4.