The historic core of Saylac is a half-deserted scatter of coral-stone walls, doorways, and the foundations of houses, mosques, and warehouses. The civil war and decades of neglect have left most of the older buildings in ruins, but the layout of the medieval town — narrow lanes, blocks of merchants' compounds, the line of the old harbour wall on the seaward side — is still legible.
A walk through with a local guide gives the best sense of what the town was. Almost everything dates to the medieval and Ottoman periods, before the British Somaliland administration moved its centre to Berbera in the late nineteenth century and Saylac began its long decline.