Socotra Island

Socotra is one of those “lost world” islands (separated from the world six million years ago) where intrepid travelers - particularly those seeking  exotic nature and wildlife in a remote tropical setting - can go days on end without rubbing shoulders with that less -than-endangered species…tourists.

Known for decades as the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean, it’s the world’s tenth richest island for endemic plant species. And the biggest island in the Middle East 125 kilometers in length and 45 kilometers across.

Meanwhile the landscape is one of contrasts, for example, it has isolated nature preserves with dazzling wildlife (including 900 species of plants, and the famous Dragon’s Blood Tree “dracaena cinnabara” and the some of rarest birds that exist nowhere else in the world), and picturesque sandy beaches.  

This website is designed to help you discover the virgin beauty of the magical Socotra Island. This site is a complete eco-tourism and destination guide to Socotra Island and offers over 50 Pages of Essential Information, Travel Tips for visitors, comprehensive reports about the  Socotra General information, Socotra History, Socotra natural history of fauna and flora, people and culture, Socotra weather patterns, and the local organizations present on the island.  Additionally, we describe in detail our services in Our Contacts and Who we are?

This is the award winning tourism destination guide to Socotra Island where recommended programs/itineraries and tailor-made  tours can be made at your convenience. DBT Socotra Adventure Tours offers a variety of science trips by 4x4 vehicles with a wealth of beautiful sceneries, ancient culture, traditional villages. And some vicinities incorporate camping in the presence of pure nature, trekking and camel riding, bird watching, and the sea waters invites you to go scuba diving, surfing and of course swimming, as well as many other activities such as fishing and boat safaris. You will have the opportunity to reward yourself by observing whales and dolphins right next to the boat, and if you are lucky you will be thrilled to swim with the gentle dolphins of the Indian Ocean.  There are many other activities such as bicycling, visiting tropical markets, etc.  There is much to see and do outdoors.  Socotraislandadventure.com will help you to choose this paradise island as one of your future eco-vacation destinations .

Other links discuss the places to visit  with an interactive map and tour guide plus exhaustive information about the verity of tourism sites on the island you will visit including the spectacular fresh water pools, splendid canyons and valleys, amazing sand dunes, and giant clam beaches. In addition are some useful articles about the Zoning Plan, the Caves Explorations, and the Geography & Geology of Socotra Island.

One of our most popular pages is the Socotra photo gallery  where you can browse through our extensive image library which shows current images and views from around the island. Be sure to check out Socotra Map  where you can see its location from the world and identify it from Yemen-Socotra. A dynamic map of Socotra Island and the archipelago map shows the other islands of Abdul Kuri, Samha and Darsa.  

 Enjoy your visit to our website and find out for yourself why this small island in the Indian Ocean is really known in as the other Galapagos Island!

Socotra was called Dioskouridou ("of the Dioscurides") in the 1st century AD, in the “Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,” an early shipping manual. “Dioscoridou is very large but desert and marshy, having rivers in it and crocodiles and many snakes and great lizards, of which the flesh is eaten and the fat melted and used instead of olive oil" - thus commented the author of the Periplus. The island that he was describing was Socotra, which today forms part of the Republic of Yemen. The crocodiles and giant lizards referred to by the author of the Periplus are no longer present there today. No fossils have so far been discovered but this is not to say that they did not exist. Indeed, the Indian Ocean crocodile survived right up to the 17th century AD when it was described by sailors visiting the Seychelles, which lie 1,600 km due south. Such lost inhabitants apart however, Socotra remains, from a natural history viewpoint, one of the most fascinating places in the world. Its unique character is the result of a long period of isolation. As a result, many animals and plants that live today on Socotra are found nowhere else on earth. The very high degree of endemism is what makes Socotra such an important place in terms of global wildlife conservation, and it is sometimes called the Galapagos of the East. It is believed that some of the plants and animals found on Socotra are in fact ancient relics from a much larger land mass (Africa) which have been preserved here as a result of the fact that the Hagghir massif has not been totally submerged.

                                                                                                                                                       In the notes to his translation of the Periplus, G.W.B. Huntingford remarks that the name Suqotra is not Greek in origin, but from the Sanskrit dvipa sukhadhara ("island of bliss"). Another probable origin of the name is the Arabic “Suq” meaning “market” and “qotra” meaning “dripping frankincense”. The ancient frankincense route that went through to Jerusalem and to Europe, began on Socotra, and the present town of Suq on the north coast near Hadiboh, was the port from which the frankincense (and myrrh and aloes) began its journey. A tradition holds that the inhabitants were converted to Christianity by Thomas the apostle in AD 52, and that Thomas was once shipwrecked on Socotra during his frequent journeys to India, and the shipwreck was used to build a church. In the 10th century the Arab geographer Abu Zaid Hassan states that in his time most of the inhabitants were Christians.                                                                                                        

The famous Venetian traveler Marco Polo (1254-1324) visited Socotra and accused the Socotrans of having the supernatural ability to control the weather and to cause shipwrecks. He wrote of Socotra saying, “I give you my word that the people of this island are the most expert enchanters in the world. It is true that the archbishop does not approve of these enchantments and rebukes them for the practice. But this has no effect, because they say that their forefathers did these things of old.

The explorer Tristão da Cunha put ashore in the early 16th century and considered Socotra conquered for Portugal. He landed at the previously mentioned port town of Suq which was the old capital of the Socotran sultans. A military force soon came and occupied Suq (but not Socotra) for about seven years from 1504 to 1511. Suq was the site of a fierce battle with the Suqotrans, which was partly the cause of the eventual Portuguese departure, although the deprivation in living there was also a big factor. Today, the remains of the old Portuguese fort can be seen by climbing the rocky outcrop beside Suq, and the rump pillars of a church built by the Portuguese can be seen on the edge of the town. At this time Christianity had disappeared from the island except for stone crosses at which the Portuguese Alvares said people worshipped. However, during a visit to the island in 1542, Francis Xavier found a group of people claiming to be descended from the converts made by St. Thomas.

The islands passed under the control of the Mahra sultans in 1511, but eventually became a British protectorate in 1886, and it became an important strategic stop-over for British shipping in the area. It was an important air base for the British in World War two, and the remains of the main airfield can be seen inland from Suq. Some 10 British airmen are buried on cemetery hill near the Mori airfield, and all these were all killed in crashes during World War 2. A German U boat scuttled a dhow off Qalansiya, and was apparently sunk by later action of the air force. With the independence of South Yemen from the British in 1969, the islands came under the southern government of the Democratic Republic of Yemen, and then after unification with the north in 1990, the island came under the governance of the new Republic of Yemen.

Apart from some 19th century travel accounts (such as Bent) and a few more recent expeditions, including that of the Oxford University team led by Douglas Botting (July-August 1955), and a British joint-services and civilian expedition (in 1967), the Socotra archipelago has received relatively little attention from the scientific community, being virtually isolated from the rest of the world. Until the end of the twentieth century it was effectively closed to foreign visitors by a combination of military considerations and extreme natural conditions. Books have been published by the leaders of the above expeditions which can be found in the large English libraries of the world. (see Island of the Dragons Blood, by Douglas Botting, from the 1955 expedition, and Socotra: Island of Tranquillity, by Brian Doe, published by Immel Publishing, 1992). Other more recent books of excellent quality and scholarship have been published about Socotran fauna and flora by Wolfgang Wranik, and by Tony Miller and Miranda Morris, who have devoted many years of research to Socotra since the early 1980’s. Publications are now available also at the center for the Socotra Conservation and Development Fund in Hadiboh, which began in the late 1990’s as a United Nations research and development venture, and has done considerable scientific research on the Socotra Archipelago.

The Socotra Archipelago is divided into two administrative districts, Hadibo and Qalansiya, which also includes the islands of Abdul Kuri, Darsa and Samhah. Both districts come under the administration of the Governor of Hadramaut in al-Mukalla, The population of the entire Archipelago is estimated at 70,000 , with most people living on Socotra Island and concentrated in the capital town of Hadibo and the western town of Qalansiya. Owing to the isolation of the islands, the ancient language of Socotra was able to survive. Today both Socotri and Arabic are spoken on the island.

Socotra is distinguished by a distinct and unique cultural history.  Although it is unlikely that the legend that Aristotle advised Alexander the Great to send colonists to Socotra to harvest aloe is true, the existence of such a legend points to Socotra being “on the map” already in ancient times.  Archaeological work over the last century has shown that the island was inhabited from at least the first centuries A.D., and that Socotra was visited and settled by Africans, Arabs and Indians.  Socotra’s language – belonging to a group of Semitic South-Arabian languages – was most probably spoken in some form on the island even at this time.  Christianity was the island’s most prominent religion until the 15-16th centuries, when Socotra came increasingly under the influence of the Mahran Sultanate of eastern Yemen.  It is difficult to say how quickly Socotra’s Islamization proceeded, but by the end of the 18th century at the latest the last vestiges of Christianity had disappeared.  During the 19th century Socotra came to attract the attention of great powers again with the interest of Great Britain the region culminating in the island becoming a British protectorate in the 1870s.  British influence on Socotra ceased in 1967, when the Socialist People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen came to power in Southern Yemen.  In 1990 North and South Yemen were unified and Socotra has been part of a unified Yemen ever since.

Socotra’s population is divided between the inhabitants of the mountainous interior and the islands’ coastal regions.  The former have traditionally made their living herding goats, sheep and cows and harvesting their date palms, while the latter’s livelihood has been based on fishing.  Some of the fishermen on the island’s northern coast are of African origin, having been brought over at the end of the 19th century to work for the Sultan.  Since 1999, when the island’s airstrip was lengthened, enabling flights year-round, including during the four month summer monsoon, development on the island has expanded rapidly.  Simultaneously, Yemenis from the mainland have immigrated to Socotra in greater numbers, opening numerous shops in the island’s capital, Hadibo. Socotra heavily depends on outside support, which comes mainly from the Yemeni Government and some development programs of NGO’s and International Organizations. An estimated number of 8,000 Socotris live and work in the Emirates,   probably contributing considerably to the income of related families on the island. Due to the insufficient provision of basic human needs, such as access to sustainable livelihoods, safe water, health services, education etc.., a majority of the population of Socotra Archipelago are considered to live below the absolute poverty line.

Today, as the memory of the days when Socotra was ruled by local sultans fades with the passing of the island’s older generations, Socotra finds itself at a crossroads.  Will the Socotris be able to preserve their environment, their culture and language while benefiting from development and tourism, or will Socotra suffer the fate of so many other once isolated regions of the world and lose its unique human and natural heritage as it is increasingly integrated into world economic flows?