About five hundred tower houses of mud brick, five to eleven storeys, some over 30 metres, packed tight inside a wall in the Wadi Hadhramaut. They went up that way for defence, to put the households above Bedouin raids, and the result is a skyline nobody expects in the sixteenth century, which is why it gets called the Manhattan of the Desert. The present town dates to 1533 though the site has been settled about 1,700 years, and it became capital of the Kingdom of Hadhramaut in AD 300 after Shabwa was destroyed. Around 7,000 people live in it. UNESCO listed it in 1982 and moved it to the endangered list in 2015 because of the civil war and the damage from it. Hadhramaut Governorate.
Hadhramaut, Yemen
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