Shibam

Eleven-storey mud skyscrapers, standing since the 1500s

Shibam stands on a rocky spur in Wadi Hadhramaut in eastern Yemen, a walled town of about 7,000 people whose houses are tower blocks of sun-dried mud brick. About 500 of them rise five to eleven storeys, with one or two rooms to a floor, and some pass 30 metres, among the tallest mud buildings in the world. The ground floors have almost no windows. The layout kept households above Bedouin raids and gave rival families refuge from each other, and the skyline earned the town its nicknames, the Manhattan of the Desert and the Chicago of the Desert.

The first known inscription about the city dates from the 3rd century CE. Shibam became capital of the Kingdom of Hadhramaut in AD 300, after the earlier capital Shabwa, further west along the wadi, was destroyed, and it prospered as a caravan halt on the spice and incense route across the southern Arabian plateau. A massive flood in 1532 and 1533 partly destroyed the older settlement, and the present town dates to 1533. The Friday mosque is mostly 9th to 10th century and the castle 13th century. In the late 19th century traders returning from Asia rebuilt the walled city, and a suburb, al-Sahil, has since grown on the southern bank of the wadi. In the 20th century Shibam was one of the three major cities of the Qu'aiti Sultanate, with Mukalla and Ash-Shihr.

Mud walls need fresh layers of mud to stand up to rain and erosion, and the town has had a hard run. A tropical storm in 2008 flooded it and undermined foundations until buildings collapsed. On 15 March 2009 a suicide bomber killed four South Korean tourists and their Yemeni guide in an attack claimed by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. UNESCO listed Shibam in 1982 and put it on the list of World Heritage in Danger in 2015, when civil war broke out in Yemen. The fields around the town are still watered by seasonal spate floods, and the same system supplies the mud the houses are built and repaired with.