The Horn of Africa's most surreal city — Afar nomads, French café culture, and the saltiest body of water on earth an hour from downtown
Djibouti City is one of the smallest and most strategically positioned capital cities in the world — a port city on the Bab-el-Mandeb strait where the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden, one of the most intensely contested maritime chokepoints on earth. The city is a strange and compelling hybrid: French Foreign Legion bars and café crème next to Afar nomad markets and Somali idir tea houses. The surrounding country holds Lake Assal — the most saline body of water outside Antarctica, a crater lake of white salt crystals 155 metres below sea level — and Lake Abbe, a surreal Afar landscape of limes…
The site of Djibouti City was a small Afar fishing village called Ras Djibouti before the French established a coaling station here in 1888. France colonised the territory as French Somaliland specifically to counter British control of Aden across the strait. The Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway (1917) made the city the only port for landlocked Ethiopia, a role it still plays today — the vast majority of Ethiopia's imports pass through Djibouti's port. The territory became independent as the Republic of Djibouti in 1977. The country hosts the largest concentration of foreign military bases in the…