Best Things to Do in Asmara

Asmara rewards unhurried exploration on foot. Within a three-kilometre radius on the flat highland plateau, you can trace bold 1930s modernist experiments, step into three major religious traditions, watch master metalworkers transform scrap into household goods and sip some of the finest espresso in Africa.

1. Marvel at the cantilevered wings of Fiat Tagliero. Completed in 1938 by engineer Giuseppe Pettazzi in the shape of a soaring monoplane, this Futurist service station features 15-metre reinforced-concrete wings projecting without a single supporting pillar.
2. Stroll palm-lined Harnet Avenue and climb the Catholic Cathedral bell tower. Walk the main promenade of the capital and ascend the 52-metre Lombard-Romanesque brick campanile of Our Lady of the Rosary for a bird's-eye view over the city grid.
3. Admire the vertical relief lights of Cinema Impero and Cinema Roma. Designed by Mario Messina in 1937, Cinema Impero's symmetrical red-and-white facade is punctuated by forty-five glowing circular portholes and three vertical lettering fins, while nearby Cinema Roma conceals a curved marble foyer.
4. Explore the Medeber Open-Air Recycling Market. Step inside this remarkable labyrinth of workshops in northern Asmara where hundreds of artisans hammer old oil drums, lorry springs and scrap aluminium into gleaming coffee roasters, stoves and grain mills.
5. Visit Enda Mariam Orthodox Cathedral and the Al Khulafa Al Rashiudin Mosque. Complete Asmara's triangle of faiths by admiring the mosaic facade and thatched lantern towers of the Eritrean Orthodox cathedral alongside the travertine columns and fluted dome of the Great Mosque.
6. Drink a morning macchiato and eat a pastry at a vintage bar. Pull up a stool at Bar Vittoria, Café Cristal or Pasticceria Moderna to hear brass 1950s Gaggia machines hiss out rich espresso topped with dense highland milk foam.
7. Walk through the Asmara Tank Graveyard (Denden Camp). On the south-eastern edge of the city, rusting military vehicles and armoured personnel carriers left over from Eritrea's thirty-year independence struggle sit stacked against open highland skies.
8. See the 1916 Asmara Opera House and the Bowling Alley. Admire the neo-Renaissance colonnade and Art Nouveau ceiling frescoes of the Opera House on Harnet Avenue, then bowl a game on wooden 1950s lanes lit by coloured glass blocks near the railway station.
9. Experience a traditional Eritrean bun coffee ceremony. Watch green coffee beans roasted over charcoal in a pan, wafted toward guests with frankincense smoke, pounded in a wooden mortar and brewed three times (awel, tona, bereka) in a clay jebena pot.
10. Peer over the Great Rift Valley escarpment on the Massawa road. Stand at the eastern edge of the plateau near Bet Gergis as clouds billow up from the Red Sea plain two kilometres below, where the historic 19th-century Eritrean Railway clings to cliff tunnels.