AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Batsi Island — written on maps as Bats'i'i Desēt, meaning "Batsi Island" in Tigrinya — is the small coral islet at the heart of Massawa, Eritrea's ancient port on the Red Sea. Locally known as the Geri, or Old Town, this is the oldest and most atmospheric part of the city: a maze of narrow alleys and sun-bleached coral-stone houses left over from centuries of Ottoman, Egyptian and Arab trading.↗↗↗
A causeway links the island to the neighbouring Taulud islet, where most hotels stand, so the old quarter is easy to reach on foot. Today the island wears its history openly: grand decayed mansions, an old bazaar, the country's oldest mosque and shrines steeped in legend sit shoulder to shoulder with Eritrea's main deep-sea harbour, giving visitors a rare sense of a working port that is also a living museum.↗↗
The coral core of the Pearl of the Red Sea
Massawa has grown across a handful of low islands and peninsulas joined to the mainland by earthen dams, but the historical city began on two of them. The older settlement sits on Batsi — in old Arabic and Ethiopian records called Basé or Batsiideset — a flat coral islet with no fresh-water springs of its own, whose walls, roofs and foundations were once built from cut dry coral. The historian Richard Pankhurst identifies this coast with the Arab trading port of Badi, which flourished between roughly 600 and 1100 AD, and local seafarers have hauled goods through these sheltered channels ever since.