The Art Deco city in the clouds — Africa's forgotten modernist gem
Asmara is one of the world's great architectural surprises — a UNESCO World Heritage city sitting 2,325 metres above sea level, where Italian colonial architects between 1935 and 1941 built an almost perfectly preserved Art Deco city with futurist cinemas, cubist gas stations, and a granite-clad opera house. The city's café culture is genuine espresso-and-macchiato Italian, the streets are immaculate and safe, and the Eritrean food — injera, zigni, and the sugo of the Tigrinya kitchen — is unlike anything eaten in the rest of the Horn.
Asmara grew from a village of four clans into an Italian colonial capital after Italy seized Eritrea in 1889. The building boom of 1935-41 under Governor Teruzzi produced over 400 modernist buildings — the highest concentration of 20th-century modernist architecture in the world, earning UNESCO listing in 2017. Eritrea achieved independence in 1993 after a 30-year liberation war against Ethiopia, making it one of Africa's youngest nations.