Yemen

Yemen is a country in Asia.

It is at the bottom corner of a big piece of land called Arabia. It has mountains and deserts. The capital city is called Sanaa.

Yemen is at the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. The Red Sea lies to the west, and the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea lie to the south. Saudi Arabia and Oman are its neighbors.

Yemen is mostly mountains and dry land, but some areas get enough rain for farming. Long ago, the Romans called it Arabia Felix, which means Fortunate Arabia, because it was fertile and rich from trade. Sanaa is the capital, high in the mountains, and the port of Aden is its center for business. More than 35 million people live in Yemen.

Yemen lies at the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, at the southern entrance of the Red Sea, a crossroads of ancient and modern trade routes. Britannica describes it as mostly mountainous and generally arid, though broad areas get enough rain for successful farming; its area is about 455,000 km². Ancient states there controlled the supply of frankincense and myrrh, and the Romans called the region Arabia Felix.

Under the 1990 unification agreement, Sanaa, formerly North Yemen's capital, is the political capital and Aden, formerly South Yemen's, is the economic center. Population figures are uncertain: Britannica estimates about 35.6 million (2026) and the World Bank about 41.8 million (2025). More than two-thirds of Yemenis are under 30, and about two-thirds live in the countryside.

Sanaa is the capital. It is high in the mountains.

Its old houses are tall and decorated with white patterns. Shibam is a desert town with very tall mud houses. Aden is a big port by the sea.

Sanaa sits in a mountain valley 2,200 meters above sea level, and people have lived there for more than 2,500 years. Its old city has more than 6,000 houses built before the 11th century, many of them tall tower-houses made of rammed earth.

In the dry east, the walled town of Shibam is famous for its tall mud-brick tower houses, which have earned it the nickname the Manhattan of the desert. Zabid, near the Red Sea coast, was Yemen's capital from the 13th to the 15th century. All three are World Heritage Sites. Aden, on the Gulf of Aden, is a busy port city.

UNESCO's Old City of Sana'a (1986), at 2,200 m, has been inhabited for more than 2,500 years and became a major center for the spread of Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries; it preserves 103 mosques, 14 hammams and over 6,000 houses built before the 11th century, with many-storied tower-houses of rammed earth (pisé). The 16th-century walled city of Shibam (1982) is one of the oldest and best examples of urban planning based on vertical construction, nicknamed the Manhattan of the desert. Zabid (1993), founded in the early 9th century, was Yemen's capital from the 13th to 15th centuries and was known for its Islamic university.

Britannica notes that Yemen's domestic architecture dates back more than 2,000 years: stone and brick towers of four to six stories in the mountains, and tinted mud-brick houses with curving lines on the desert edge. Aden, the economic capital, opened a new container port in 1999.

Yemen has very tall mountains.

Farmers build steps called terraces on the mountain sides. Near the sea it is hot and dry. Far out at sea is an island called Socotra.

Yemen has a narrow, hot coastal plain called the Tihamah, then high mountains, then dry highlands that drop into the sandy Empty Quarter desert. Its highest peak, Mount Al-Nabi Shuayb, rises 3,665 meters. Farmers have built terraces from the bottom to the top of some mountains, and their soil has been enriched for centuries.

Yemen has no rivers that flow all year. Rain increases with height: the coast gets less than 130 millimeters a year, while the highlands around Ibb and Taizz get more than 750. Far out in the Arabian Sea lies Socotra, an island with many plants and animals found nowhere else.

Britannica divides Yemen into five regions: the Tihamah coastal plain (8 to 65 km wide), the western highlands, the central massif with many peaks over 3,000 m and Al-Nabi Shuayb at 3,665 m, the eastern highlands (750 to 1,100 m) and the desert regions sloping to the Rub al-Khali. There are no permanent watercourses; intermittent wadis drain to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, the largest being Wadi Hadhramaut. Hot springs and fumaroles show continuing volcanic activity, and the country lies astride an active fault zone of the Red Sea region.

The northerly winter winds and the southwest summer monsoon set the seasons. The coast gets under 130 mm of rain a year, the middle highlands around Taizz and Ibb more than 750 mm, and the highest northern peaks see occasional frost and snow. Socotra, about 1,000 km east of Aden, is part of a 250-km archipelago where, UNESCO reports, 37 percent of 825 plant species, 90 percent of reptile species and 95 percent of land snail species occur nowhere else.

People in Yemen speak Arabic.

Many families live in villages in the mountains. Some houses have five floors! People eat flat bread, chicken and stews.

More than nine in ten people in Yemen speak Arabic as their first language, and on Socotra and in the east some people also speak old languages such as Soqotri and Mehri. Most Yemenis are Muslims.

About two-thirds of people live in the countryside, often in small villages built on rocky ground so the farmland stays free. Houses may be five or more stories tall, with stone lower floors and mud-brick upper floors where the family lives. A popular dish is saltah, a spiced stew of lamb or chicken, eaten with flat bread, and tea and coffee are favorite drinks.

Britannica notes that Yemenis overwhelmingly identify as Arabs, with minorities including the Mahra of the east and Socotra, communities of Somali, Indian and Indonesian origin around Aden, and long-standing African ties on the Tihamah. More than nine-tenths speak a dialect of Arabic first, and Modern Standard Arabic is taught in schools; ancient Semitic languages such as Bathari, Mehri and Soqotri survive mainly in spoken form. Islam is the state religion; the Sunni Shafii school predominates, with a Zaydi Shii community long dominant in the northern highlands.

Villages are built on uncultivable ground, often along cliffs, with houses of hand-cut stone below and insulating mud brick above. The most common crops are cereals such as millet, corn, wheat, barley and sorghum; coffee grows best in the middle highlands at 1,400 to 2,000 m. Cuisine shares much with the rest of Arabia but is influenced by East Africa and South Asia: chicken, mutton and goat, flat breads, and saltah, a stew spiced with fenugreek.