Ethiopia's Rift Valley resort — Lake Hawassa's fish market at dawn, maribou storks on the waterfront, and the finest tibs in the south
Hawassa (Awasa) is the capital of the Sidama Region and the most pleasant Rift Valley town in Ethiopia — 275km south of Addis Ababa, on the western shore of Lake Hawassa, at 1,680m with a year-round mild climate that makes it the preferred weekend escape from the capital. The city is the most modern and well-planned large town in southern Ethiopia (partly because it was planned as a regional capital from scratch in the 1980s), with wide tree-lined avenues, a lake promenade, and an economy driven by agriculture (the Sidama coffee belt), light industry (the Hawassa Industrial Park, Ethiopia's f…
Lake Hawassa and its surroundings have been settled by Sidama people since the medieval period; the Sidama are one of the largest ethnic groups in Ethiopia (over 4 million) with a distinct language and culture from the Cushitic family. The modern city of Hawassa was built from the 1970s onward as the regional capital of Sidamo province — a planned city rather than an organic urban growth centre. The Sidama people voted for separate regional statehood in a 2019 referendum (the first ethnic group to successfully invoke Ethiopia's constitutional right to self-determination at the regional level)…