Harar
ሐረር
Harari Region, Ethiopia · 9°18′40″N 42°07′06″E
A 16th-century walled city of 82 mosques and 360 lanes, where hyenas are hand-fed at the gates every night and the coffee is among the best on Earth.
Harar Jugol, the old walled city, is barely half a square kilometre and contains more than 80 mosques and 100 shrines, which makes it one of the densest sacred landscapes in Africa. The lanes are painted in ochre, blue and green and are too narrow for cars. Rimbaud lived here in the 1880s, trading coffee and guns; the house named after him is a museum.
After dark, the hyena men feed wild hyenas by hand outside the walls, a practice at least a century old.
Why it stays quiet
Ethiopia's tourism circuit runs north, to Lalibela and the Simien mountains. Harar is a full day east of Addis and gets a few hundred foreign visitors a month.
Where it is
Before you go
The Harari coffee ceremony is worth accepting when offered. Chat (khat) markets are lively but photograph with permission. Altitude 1,900 m.
Updated 2026-09-06 · Suggest a correction
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