Terraced farmland in Yemen’s Haraz highlands. Photo source.

The Terraces

Day 207. I was watching two discussions about Ansarallah, which governs about 70% of Yemen’s population, and its conflict with Saudi Arabia when the photographs caught my attention. World Bank · April 2026

When I hear Saudi Arabia, I almost always picture desert. Yemen lies just to its south, across borderlands the two countries fought over and disputed for decades before reaching a settlement in 2000. I hadn’t pictured green terraces curving around steep mountains, with villages perched above them. Parts of Yemen looked more like Hawaii or Jamaica. Sana’a Center

Yemen’s western mountains rise beyond 10,000 feet. Seasonal winds, including the summer monsoon, bring moist air against their slopes. Forced upward, that air cools, forming clouds and rain. Generations of farmers have built stone terraces to hold the soil and slow the water’s passage downhill, giving it time to soak into their fields. Some cultivated strips are barely a metre wide. World Bank’s climate assessment · FAO’s field assessment

Mountain villages and terraced fields in Haraz, Yemen · Aug 28, 2013. Rod Waddington · CC BY-SA 4.0.

Those terraces are the work of generations, and families still depend on them. Giving up that land would mean giving up their fields, their livelihoods and the life they’ve built around them. Looking at those mountains, I can understand why people would fight to stay. In Haraz, villages were built on rocky heights both for defense and to leave more room for cultivation. Their sandstone and basalt houses blend into the mountain, with fields stepping down below them. Yemen’s UNESCO submission

Coffee grows in those terraced highlands too, which brings us to Mokha. Arabica’s wild home is in Ethiopia and South Sudan. Yemen became an early center of cultivation and a major source of the coffee traded abroad. Mokha, the port on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, became so closely associated with that trade that its name followed the beans around the world. The “mocha” on a café menu carries that history. Kew · FAO

— T.