Shibam
Interesting facts
- The British explorer Freya Stark is credited with calling Shibam the Manhattan of the desert after travelling in Hadhramaut in the 1930s.
- The whole walled town fits into a rectangle of only about 250 by 350 metres.
- Its bricks are a mix of local soil, straw and water, shaped and left to dry in the sun for days.
- Most tower houses have only one or two rooms per floor, so families lived stacked vertically rather than spread out.
- The mud walls are protected by lime plaster that has to be renewed roughly every 25 years.
- The Friday mosque is considered the oldest in Hadhramaut and is traditionally dated to the era of Caliph Harun al-Rashid in the early 9th century.
- Unusually for the region, the old mosque contains red fired bricks, rather than only sun-dried mud.
- Shibam remained the leading town of the valley until the 15th century, when neighbouring Seiyun rose to become the seat of power.
- The town sits on a raised spur within the wadi, which keeps its houses above the seasonal floodwaters.
Why it is worth it
Out of the flat floor of Wadi Hadhramaut rises a tight, walled block of tower houses, five to eleven storeys tall, all built of sun-dried mud brick and packed so close together that from a distance the town looks like a single carved mass. Shibam has been called the "Manhattan of the Desert" and the oldest skyscraper city in the world, and it remains one of the earliest and most complete examples of urban planning built upwards rather than outwards.
The town has a long past. Inscriptions mention it from the third century AD, and around 300 it became the capital of the Kingdom of Hadhramaut after the destruction of the older capital, Shabwa. The town visible today dates largely from 1533 onwards, although the city as a whole has existed for some 1,700 years. It sits on a mound more than six metres above the surrounding plain — whether this is the debris of earlier towns accumulated over centuries or a natural spur of rock has never been settled by excavation. Some of the towers exceed 30 metres in height.
About 500 of Shibam's houses are tower blocks. Building upwards inside a fortified wall was a response to insecurity: the height and the compact plan protected the inhabitants from Bedouin raids. Mud brick, however, is a fragile material that needs constant maintenance, and floods in the wadi, such as those of 2008, have repeatedly tested the town. The Great Mosque stands among the towers. In 1982 the walled city was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, recognised as an outstanding example of traditional vertical architecture.
Getting there
Shibam lies in Wadi Hadhramaut in Hadhramaut Governorate, eastern Yemen, about 12 km from the town of Seiyun; Tarim lies further east along the same valley. The nearest airport is Seiyun Hadhramaut International Airport (GXF), about 18 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Shibam, officially the Old Walled City of Shibam, is a town in Wadi Hadhramaut in eastern Yemen with about 7,000 inhabitants. It is the seat of the Shibam District in the Hadhramaut Governorate. It is known for its mudbrick-made high-rise buildings, with some of the buildings reaching as high as eleven stories. The design centred around protecting the residents of the city from Bedouin attacks.
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