01 A complete catalogue, still standing
This trip is for a very specific profile, and saying so early saves disappointment. Asmara has no nature to offer, no wildlife, no beach and no food scene that justifies the airfare on its own. What it has is a city, and a very particular one. If you travel for architecture, it is one of the best decisions available; if you travel for anything else, it is not.
The pieces everyone hunts for are three or four. The Cinema Impero, opened in 1937, with its reddish brick façade and the vertical lettering still in place. The Fiat Tagliero service station, of 1938, built to look like an aircraft, with two cantilevered concrete wings that hold themselves up. The cubist Africa Pension. And the Bar Zilli, 1930s art deco.
The good thing about Asmara is not the four buildings in the photographs: it is the anonymous block between one and the next, built to exactly the same standard.
02 All on foot
The biggest practical advantage of this destination is that you need nothing. No car, no driver, no booked excursions. The protected centre is covered on foot, the city is flat and the distances are short: 45 square kilometres in all, and the interesting ensemble takes up a fraction of that.
The way that works is to split it up. One day for the main avenue and its cross streets, where the cinemas, bars and corner buildings concentrate. Another for the side streets, where the same language repeats in domestic form and with nobody watching. And half a day for the districts of low sheet-metal-roofed houses, which are the other half of the city and appear in no dossier.
One detail changes the rhythm of the day: altitude. At 2,325 metres the body takes forty-eight hours to adjust, and a full day on your feet is longer than it looks on the map. The first day is worth cutting short. The city, on the other hand, helps: it is a quiet, low-rise capital with no oppressive traffic.
03 The train
There is a second piece from the same period that is not in the centre: the railway. The Eritrean line was built between 1887 and 1932, with 317 kilometres of 950-millimetre narrow gauge, and linked the plateau with the Red Sea across more than two thousand metres of descent. It went out of service around 1978 and was rebuilt in sections after independence; the stretch from Asmara towards Massawa was operational again by 2009.
Today it is not a scheduled passenger service. What runs are excursions, mainly with steam stock, aimed at enthusiasts and put on when there is coal and there are enough travellers. It is best not to take it for granted when planning: if it runs, it is among the best things on the trip; if it does not, the station is worth visiting anyway.
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04 How the trip is put together
Four or five days is the right measure. Two for the protected centre, one for the side streets and the low districts, and the rest as slack for the train and for going back. Going back matters more than it sounds: the buildings change completely between the hard light of midday and the low light of six, and many of the best façades only work at one of those two hours.
The month has a clear answer. From September to March the sky is open — between 213 and 291 hours of sunshine a month — and it rains very little: in February, two millimetres in the whole month. October is the best of all, with clean air just after the rains end. July and August are the only two worth avoiding: 175 and 156 millimetres, and half the sunshine.
On the ground, two honest warnings. First: expect no interpretation. There are almost no guided visits, no panels and no published material about the buildings; the work of identifying what you are looking at is yours, and it is worth arriving with it prepared. Second: many interiors cannot be visited, and many façades have gone decades without serious repair.
And the warning that decides it. Eritrea receives very few visitors and has no tourist industry in place, so everything — permits, lodging, transfers — is arranged in advance and with patience. In exchange you take away something almost nobody has: an entire 1930s city, standing, lived in, and without a single queue in front of any building.
