The mud-brick skyscraper city of the desert
Shibam, in the Wadi Hadramaut, is a walled town of around five hundred mud-brick tower houses, many of them five to eight storeys high, packed tightly together on a rise above the valley floor. Built mostly in the sixteenth century on older foundations, its vertical layout has earned it the name 'Manhattan of the desert', and it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The houses are regularly re-plastered with fresh mud, and the best view is from the hillside across the wadi at sunset.