Travel Guide Moukalla

240 kilometres of asphalt road separate Shibam and Moukalla. The third port of Yemen and the regional capital of Hadramawt, with a population of 350 000. It is an important centre for fishing and exporting fish and lobster. There are canning and freezing plants installed. The city has developed much since 1990, with buildings and villas in all directions. Henri de Monfreid, in his logbook, described Moukalla as follows: " Built on the floor on the narrow space separating the vertical wall of the mountain from the sea, the city gives the impression of a hive to the countless alveoli. The houses seem to climb each other to look at the sea of their small windows. The first houses are so crowded between the cliff and the sea that the harbour they appear without thickness…» Originally inhabited by fishermen, it was the domain of Prince Al Kassad in the th century. The city became capital of the Qaiti Sultanate in 1877 and flourished in the th and th centuries. Moukalla, entirely built in stone, does not have the architectural originality you find in the cities of Hadramawt, but it has the charm of a port. When you walk in the streets, you notice the houses, painted in white. They display for most beautiful sculpted doors and wood finely pierced at the bottom of their windows.It is good to walk at the end of the day, after the dinner that the inhabitants take early, and stroll on the long dike converted into cafes or restaurants, where men play the domino, and strangle the legs over rails. We still smell the smells of the fish that were dumped there in the morning, the iodine that rises from the sea with its wet spray and we turn our back on the volcanic mountain, to contemplate the sea, which here is almost an ocean.