Socotra

Interesting facts

Socotra's cucumber tree, Dendrosicyos socotranus, is the only member of the entire gourd and cucumber family that grows as a true tree.

Inside Hoq Cave, sailors passing between the 1st century BC and the 6th century AD left nearly 250 inscriptions and drawings on the walls.

The first-century Greek trading guide known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea already recorded the island, under the name Dioskouridou.

About 90 percent of the archipelago's reptile species occur nowhere else on Earth.

Socotra's dragon's blood trees are on average around 300 years old, and models suggest their suitable habitat could shrink by about 45 percent by 2080.

In the ancient Mediterranean dragon's blood resin served as a dye and a medicine, and 18th-century Italian violin makers used it in varnish.

Islanders traditionally used the red resin to dye wool, glue pottery, freshen their breath and even colour their lips.

The islanders speak Soqotri, a Semitic language related to Mehri and the other Modern South Arabian languages of the mainland.

A Portuguese force under Tristão da Cunha captured the island's main settlement in 1507, only to abandon it four years later in 1511.

The Etruscan shrew, the smallest mammal in the world by mass, is among the animals recorded on the island.

Why it is worth it

Socotra broke off from the African and Arabian mainland somewhere between 6 and 18 million years ago, as tectonic shifts reshaped the Gulf of Aden, and it's been drifting in isolation in the Arabian Sea ever since. That much time cut off from anywhere else, combined with terrain running from coastal plains up through limestone plateaus to granite peaks over 1,500 meters, let evolution run its own experiment on the island largely undisturbed — Socotra now ranks among the ten richest places on Earth for endemic species relative to its size, with over a third of its roughly 825 plant species and more than 90 percent of its land snails found nowhere else.

The dragon's blood tree is the emblem, and it earns the reputation without needing embellishment: an umbrella-shaped canopy that shades its own roots and funnels scarce rain and dew straight down to them, and a blood-red resin — genuinely called "dragon's blood" — that's been traded and prized since antiquity. It belongs to one of only six tree-forming species in its genus and is often described as a living remnant of vegetation that covered a much larger area in a much older world. It's also, now, vulnerable: shrinking populations have landed it on the IUCN Red List, under pressure from grazing, drought, and a changing climate its slow-growing groves aren't built to keep pace with.

Getting there at all has its own logic to learn. Between roughly June and September, monsoon winds strong enough to shut down flights and make the sea crossing from mainland Yemen unworkable close the island off almost entirely — even to the very limited ferry service, which in any case isn't set up for foreign visitors.

Good to know

Access to Socotra depends on charter flights and organized logistics rather than scheduled commercial routes — this isn't a place to show up without arrangements already made.

Best time to visit

October through April, outside the June–September monsoon window when winds make both flights and sea access unreliable or impossible.

Getting there

306 km from El Dibir. Socotra Airport (SCT) is about 14 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Socotra, locally known as Saqatri, is a Yemeni island in the Indian Ocean. It is situated between the Gulf of Aden, the Guardafui Channel and the Arabian Sea, and lies near major shipping routes. The largest of the six islands in the Socotra archipelago, it comprises around 95% of the landmass of the archipelago. It lies 380 kilometres south of the Arabian Peninsula and 232 km (125 nmi) east of the Horn of Africa. The island is culturally and administratively a part of Yemen, but geographically it belongs to Africa, for it represents a continental fragment that is geologically linked to the Somali plate. The inhabitants of the island are called Socotrans, and they speak Arabic and Soqotri.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0