Harar Jugol is one of Africa's best-preserved medieval walled cities and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2006. The old city is encircled by a roughly oval wall — about 4 kilometres in circumference — pierced by five historic gates, each oriented toward a different direction and historically associated with a different function and community. Inside, 82 mosques, over 100 shrines, and a dense web of narrow lanes pack themselves into less than a square kilometre.
Walking the perimeter of the wall gives a sense of the city's scale. Walking the interior — especially at dawn or dusk, when the muezzins call from half a dozen different directions at once — is something more difficult to put into words. The traditional Harari houses, with their distinctive interior arrangement of shelves and baskets, are unlike anything else in Ethiopia, and a handful are open to visitors as house museums.