Where to Stay in Keren, Anseba Region

What is Keren known for?

Two things pull travellers to Keren: the granite bowl the city sits in, and what the Italian decades left standing in it. Cinema Impero went up in 1916, part of a building campaign that also produced the Commercial Bank. Stalls fill the Shuq quarter.

Grain, cotton, and livestock have changed hands on this plain since the caravan years, and the Bilen people and Tigre people who work the market give the city a register of its own, quite unlike Asmara.

What are the main landmarks in Keren?

The nineteenth-century Tigu fort still holds its hill west of the centre, Egyptian work from the years when the place was called Sanhit. Below it, the old mosque and the Sayed Bakri Mausoleum anchor the Muslim quarters, and St Michael's Cathedral serves the Catholic congregation. Stranger is the chapel in the tree.

St Maryam Deari occupies a hollow baobab, and out in the highlands east of the city the sixth-century Debre Sina monastery draws Orthodox pilgrims by the thousand each June to its cave dwellings.

What is the history of Keren?

Grain moved on camels here. Keren began as a trading settlement on an arid highland plain between the Anseba River and the Barka, and its grain came in from Arkiko on Hedareb camels alongside cotton cloth out of Sennar, ivory, skins, and ostrich feathers bound for the coast at Massawa. Missionaries followed the traders.

Giovanni Stella built a stone house in 1855 and ran an Italian agricultural colony until his death, after which Emperor Yohannes IV closed the mission and had its converts maimed. Werner Munzinger took the district for Egypt in 1872 and fortified the hill called Sanhit. Egyptian troops pulled out in February 1885, Ethiopian control proved brief, and in December 1889 an Italian column came up from the coast and folded the town into Italian Eritrea.

The railway arrived in stages. A line joining Asmara with Massawa was begun in 1911 and later pushed this way, a station opened in 1918, and from 1920 it carried enough farm traffic to widen the fields around the town. War undid much of that.

British and Italian troops fought through the mountains in February and March 1941, a battle that killed the Italian commander, General Lorenzini, and left the cemeteries the British laid out for the dead of both armies; the Bilen name Tenkuluhas marks the ground where the fighting was worst. Politics moved in behind the guns. The Muslim League was founded in the town in December 1946 by Ibrahim Sultan Ali, the Derg gave the place up after five days of fighting in July 1977, and the Eritrean People's Liberation Front held it as an unofficial capital until November 1978.

Zoba status came in 1995, when Keren became capital of what is now the Anseba Region.

Where is Keren?

Keren occupies a wide basin in the foothills of northern Eritrea, granite closing it on every side. Four peaks of that ring carry names: Zeban, Sanchil, Filesto, and Lalamba. This is highland country.

The plain the city grew on is arid ground between the Anseba River, which gives the Anseba Region its name, and the Barka, and it lies high enough above the coast for farmland rather than desert to reach the basin rim. Elabered, Hagaz, Halhal, and Melabso are among the subregions that look to it.

What is the climate of Keren?

A short monsoon does the dividing. Rain reaches Keren from the middle of June to September and then stops for the rest of the year, which is the whole of the seasonal calendar here. Altitude is the second agent.

The basin floor lies well above the coastal lowlands, so the hot semi-arid regime Keren shares with Niamey and N'Djamena runs milder in the mornings, cool enough for a jacket once the rains end, while March to the middle of June stays hot through every afternoon.

How do you get to Keren?

Everything arrives by road. The highway that ties the port of Massawa to Kassala in Sudan runs through Asmara, climbs on through Keren, and reaches the frontier at Tessenei, and that single line of tarmac carries the buses, the freight, and the visitors. Asmara lies some ninety kilometres southeast.

The Eritrean Railway is the other story: a station served Keren from 1918, decades of war left the line dismantled, and its return exists so far only as a plan.