Cisterns of Tawila

The Cisterns of Tawila are a stepped system of eighteen interconnected stone tanks carved into the wall of an extinct volcanic crater on the western edge of the Crater district. Built to capture and store the seasonal run-off from the surrounding Shamsan mountains, they could hold around 20 million litres at full capacity — enough to keep Aden through years of drought.

The site is now a park, with paths leading from one terraced tank to the next. The masonry shows several construction phases, with Himyarite, Islamic, and 19th-century British repairs all visible. The upper tanks fill first in heavy rain and overflow into those below, a system that worked for over a thousand years before Aden's modern water supply made it redundant. The setting — sheer volcanic rock above, the city of Crater below — is as striking as the engineering.

things to do sight architecture
A story
No one knows when the cisterns were first built. The earliest reliable records are from the Himyarite kingdom in the first centuries CE, but parts of the lower system may be older. They were rediscovered and excavated under British rule in 1854 after centuries of silt fill had hidden them. The cascade design is deceptively simple — water from the steep Wadi Tawila is forced through a series of pools, each acting as a sediment trap for the next, so by the time the water reaches the lowest cisterns it is clean enough to drink.

Other places in Things to Do