Al Hajjarah

At around 2,300 metres in the Haraz Mountains of western Yemen, Al Hajjarah grows straight out of the edge of a precipice. Its stone tower houses, some as tall as six storeys, stand shoulder to shoulder along the rim, their lower floors without windows, so that from below the village reads as a single continuous wall rising from the rock. White paint traces the window frames high up on the brown stone, a decoration traditionally meant to ward off the evil eye.

The Haraz has always mattered because it lies between Sanaa and the Tihamah coastal plain, and in the 11th century it became the stronghold of the Sulayhid dynasty. Al Hajjarah's citadel is attributed to the Sulayhids and dated to the 12th century, and its position later made it an important fortification for the Ottomans, who needed to control the roads between Sanaa and the coast. Like other fortified settlements of the region, it was built to withstand siege: the houses themselves form the defences, the narrow entrance could be shut with a heavy wooden door, and at least twenty-three cisterns, together with grain stores, kept the population supplied. Jewish craftsmen once lived here, as in many Yemeni towns, and the village was long a market on the route from Sanaa to Al Hudaydah. In the civil war of the 1960s it suffered damage from air raids, and many houses have since been left empty as people moved to nearby Manakhah.

The setting is as striking as the architecture. Deep valleys cut the Haraz into steep, separate massifs, and almost every slope around the village is terraced for millet, coffee and qat, with succulent euphorbias in the uncultivated ground. Al Hajjarah is regarded as one of the finest examples of Yemeni mountain architecture, and the Haraz as a whole has been on Yemen's UNESCO Tentative List since 2002.

Getting there

Al Hajjarah lies about 5 km west of Manakhah, the district centre, on a track leading off the road between Sanaa and Al Hudaydah. The town of Bajil is about 46 km away. Sanaa International Airport (SAH) is about 70 km away.