Travelling in Somalia: the Mogadishu eVisa is not valid at Hargeisa

How a visitor enters Somalia at Mogadishu or Hargeisa

Visas and stay permits are mandatory for all foreign nationals, and the passport has to stay valid for at least six months after the day of arrival. The UK guidance states both rules for "Somalia, including Somaliland", and then the two airports part company. A traveller bound for Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu applies for the eVisa before leaving home. A traveller bound for Hargeisa may still be asked to show that eVisa in order to board, and on landing finds it is not accepted for entry. The visa that counts there is the one bought at the airport, for a single entry and one month.

Beyond those two airports the guidance is less certain. It says it is unclear whether a visa is given on arrival at any other point of entry, and that a letter of invitation stating the reason for the visit may be asked for on arrival, without which entry can be refused. Since April 2013 the re-established Somali Immigration Department has required undocumented foreigners to register at its offices in the capital.

The federal eVisa system has been a concern of its own. AFP reported in November 2025 that the new system had already been hacked, and the UK guidance describes the data breach as ongoing, with applicants' names, photographs, dates and places of birth and home addresses among the leaked records.

One customs rule applies at both. Khat is legal inside Somalia and an offence to carry out of it, and officials regularly search bags at Hargeisa and Mogadishu. In Somaliland, cash or travellers' cheques worth US$10,000 or more have to be declared.

The Somali Civil Aviation Authority, the federal regulator, counts Hargeisa and Berbera among Somalia's seven main international airports in its state action plan of 2026, beside Mogadishu, Baidoa, Bossaso, Garowe and Kismayo. Mogadishu carries most of the traffic. International passengers through Aden Adde rose from 463,605 in 2023 to 529,748 in 2025, while domestic passengers fell from 506,643 to 479,942 over the same years. The authority expects the master plan for a new airport outside the city to be finished in 2026.

Why Somaliland keeps a door of its own

The two entry rules follow from a claim made in 1991 and still contested. A conference at Burao between 27 April and 15 May 1991 declared the north-western Somali territories independent. The government of Somaliland regards itself as the successor to British Somaliland, which became independent as the State of Somaliland on 26 June 1960 and joined the former Italian trust territory five days later to form the Somali Republic. In a referendum on 31 May 2001, 97.1% of those voting approved a constitution that confirmed the declaration. Somalia's history follows the union and its breakdown in detail.

The federal government has not recognised the declaration and regards the area as one of its federal member states. Israel recognised Somaliland as an independent state on 26 December 2025, the first UN member state to do so, and by October 2026 still the only one. In the Council on Foreign Relations' summary, the Somaliland government argues that it meets most of the requirements of a sovereign state: it holds elections, has its own currency and security forces, and issues its own passports.

For a visitor the claim takes the form of institutions. Somaliland keeps its own tourist offices, and its Ministry of Tourism directs travellers to historic towns such as Sheekh, Berbera and Zeila. The Bank of Somaliland, set up under the territory's constitution in 1994, regulates the Somaliland shilling, which is hard to exchange anywhere outside the territory because the territory is not recognised. The holiday calendar differs as well. Timeanddate's list for 2026 marks 18 and 19 May, the Restoration of Somaliland Sovereignty, as common local holidays, beside the anniversaries of 26 June and 1 July 1960.

The line itself moves. Puntland, a semi-autonomous state of Somalia to the east, disputes part of the territory Somaliland claims and keeps tourism offices of its own, and after fighting around Las Anod from 2022 a pro-union administration, SSC-Khatumo, took control of a large part of the east of the claimed territory. In the years of civil war after 1991, the few travellers who came mostly limited their visits to the north, and only a handful went into the southern provinces.

What the shelters at Laas Geel hold

Who found the shelters and when

Laas Geel is a granite outcrop rising from a plateau at 950 m, where two seasonal rivers meet, on the road between Hargeisa and Berbera. The name means "the camel's well" in Somali, after the water that lies close to the surface of the wadis, and the British Museum's African rock art project treats the meeting of the rivers as the key to why the outcrop was painted.

A French mission found the site in December 2002. Led by Xavier Gutherz, it was studying how herding began in the Horn. The paintings cover some twenty shelters, the biggest about 10 m long, on panels at three levels, most of them on the eastern flank of the outcrop. Stone tools were found scattered across the site, and tombs marked by stelae and mounds stand nearby.

The counts differ. Wikipedia's article on Somaliland gives ten caves against the twenty shelters in the British Museum and French ministry accounts, and it records the arrangement visitors meet on arrival: the government and local people guard the paintings, and only a restricted number of tourists are let in. The French team worked in Somaliland for reasons of access. The French culture ministry's account says research into the art of the first cattle herders was possible only there, and that the security situation in Puntland keeps foreign researchers out of a region into which the same art very probably extends.

What the painted cattle show

Most of the figures are humpless cows with curved or lyre-shaped white horns, sometimes tipped with red, and marked udders. Their necks are drawn as wide rectangles, left blank or filled with straight or wavy stripes of red and white, which researchers have read as mats hung from the neck as a ceremonial ornament. Human figures face forward with their arms held straight out, wearing what looks like a shirt, usually white, and they always stand beside a cow, under its neck, between its legs or behind it. Dogs keep close to the people. Other animals are scarce: a few figures that may be antelopes or monkeys, and two giraffes. The palette runs to red, white, black, violet, brown and yellow.

For rock art the date is unusually firm. Excavating one shelter, the French team recovered pieces of the painted wall itself and proposed a span from the middle of the fourth millennium to the middle of the third millennium BCE. Cattle bones from the same dig were too poorly preserved to show whether the animals were domestic or wild. The Wikipedia list of Somali tourist sites gives the paintings a much wider range, 9,000 to 3,000 BCE.

When it was found, Laas Geel's style had no parallel in the region. Later surveys turned up similar paintings at Dhaga Koure, Dhambalin and Karin Hagane, and the French ministry counts thirty or so sites of the same period, dominated by cattle with flat backs, the first domesticated animals to appear in the region during the third millennium BCE. Later styles add fat-tailed sheep and wild animals, and in a final phase engraved herds of dromedaries take over. In 2007 more rock art sites bearing Sabaean and Himyarite writing were found in and around Hargeisa, and developers bulldozed some of them.

Where the old trading ports stand along the coast

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, from the 1st century CE, names harbours on this coast. Before independence, European explorers occasionally came to see the historical sites that documents of its kind describe.

Which towns line the Gulf of Aden

Zeila was the commercial port of Avalites in antiquity and the first capital of the medieval Adal Sultanate. Visitors now go for its colonial buildings, the mangroves and coral reefs offshore, its cliffs and its beach. Berbera keeps buildings from the Ottoman period and two beaches, Baathela and Batalaale. Sheekh, near Berbera, has old British colonial buildings.

Further east, in Sanaag, Maydh was an ancient port and holds the tomb of Sheikh Isaaq. Las Khorey was the capital of the Warsangali Sultanate, and the sultan's former two-storey palace and a fortress stand among its ruins.

In the north-east the record turns to places the Periplus named. Bosaso was the ancient Mosylon, which that text says Greek merchants sailed to, and Damo is probably its "Market and Cape of Spices". Hafun has an ancient necropolis. Eyl, where the Nugaaleed valley reaches the Indian Ocean, was a base of the Dervish forces and keeps several Dhulbahante garesas from that time, along with buildings put up by the Italians, and Taleh was the capital of the Dervish State.

Which towns line the Indian Ocean shore

Mogadishu was the capital of the Sultanate of Mogadishu and was probably the ancient port of Sarapion that Ptolemy described. Vasco da Gama passed Mogadishu in the 15th century and recorded a large city with houses several storeys high, large palaces at its centre and many mosques with cylindrical minarets.

Gondershe is a medieval stone town built on an oasis, with coral stone houses, fortifications, tombs and mosques, and the Somali director Abdulkadir Ahmed Said shot his film La Conchiglia there in 1992. Hannassa stands on a promontory, with pillar tombs, old houses built around archways and courtyards, and a mosque whose mihrab looks out over the Indian Ocean. Merca was an ancient port of the Lower Shabelle and Barawa a medieval trading city. In the far south Kismayo has ruins of the Geledi Sultanate and other kingdoms. Hobyo, further up the coast, was the seat of the Sultanate of Hobyo.

What Mogadishu has reopened to visitors

Mogadishu was recorded at 2,120,000 people in 2015, and the Somali Tourism Association, which advises on the trade from inside the country, is based there. The federal Ministry of Tourism, set up after independence in 1960, stopped operating when the civil war began and was re-established in the 2000s. After the army drove Al-Shabaab out of the capital in mid-2011, local businessmen and returning members of the diaspora opened new hotels and guest houses, mostly for other Somalis and some Westerners, and new beachside resorts took in tourist families.

The beaches come first on most tours. Writing in November 2025, AFP's reporters followed two American visitors along Lido Beach, where children run in the water and tourists step ashore from small boats, and then to the Peace Gardens memorial park and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Their guide was Visit Mogadishu Tours, an agency that began in 2012 with a single Chinese tourist, and its daily rate covers the visa, accommodation, food and an armed vehicle escort. The UK government's advice records an attack on Lido Beach in August 2024 in which more than fifty civilians were killed and over 200 injured.

Two national institutions reopened on the same day, 1 July 2020, the 60th anniversary of independence. The National Museum had opened in 1933 and closed in 1991, and the federal government paid for its rebuilding from 2019. The National Theatre was built by Chinese engineers in 1967 as a gift from Mao Zedong. It closed in 1991, was repaired and reopened in 2012, and was destroyed by a suicide bombing fifteen days later. In 2020 its main hall seated 1,270. The third site on Somalia's tentative list, added in 2025, is in the city: the Mogadishu Secondo-Lido Lighthouse.

Nobody has a firm count of arrivals. Wikipedia's tourism article says that after so long without regulation it is uncertain how many international tourists come each year. The tourism minister told AFP in November 2025 that roughly 10,000 people visited in 2024, mostly from China, the United States and Türkiye, and that the figure for 2025 could be twice that. The government says tourism employs some 30,000 people.

When the Gu and the Deyr rains arrive

The Somali year has four seasons, set by shifts in the wind, and herding and farming are organised around them.

The sources agree on the order and differ by a few weeks at the edges. Britannica starts the Xagaa in June. The Bushbushle submission to UNESCO, which spells it Haga, runs it from June to late September and ends the Deyr in mid-December. Between the monsoons, in October and November and again from March to May, come the hot and humid periods called tangambili.

Because Somalia lies close to the equator, its climate changes little through the year outside the north. Mean daily maximum temperatures run from 30 to 40 °C across most of the country. The north has the widest range, above 45 °C on the coastal plains in July and below freezing in the highlands in December, and at Berbera the afternoon high averages more than 38 °C from June to September. The Indian Ocean coast is cooler because of a cold current offshore, and coastal readings usually run five to ten degrees under those inland. Mogadishu's afternoon highs average 28 to 32 °C in April and fall to the mid or upper twenties in July. Coastal humidity stays around 70% even in the dry seasons.

Rain is scarce almost everywhere. The World Bank's climate portal puts the national mean at 26.5 °C and 294.52 mm of rain a year over 1995 to 2014. The north-east takes less than 100 mm in an average year and the south-west and north-west 500 to 600 mm, mostly as showers or local downpours.

Where the parks on the tentative list lie

Somalia ratified the World Heritage Convention on 23 July 2020 and has no property inscribed. Its tentative list, the inventory of properties a state intends to consider for nomination, holds three: Bushbushle National Park and the Hobyo grass and shrubland, both submitted in 2024, and the Mogadishu lighthouse from 2025.

Bushbushle lies in the Badhadhe district of Lower Juba, in Jubaland State, and covers about 3,340 km² of East African coastal forest. Its submission of 20 March 2024 counts about 916 plant species and 293 bird species, and among the mammals the critically endangered hirola, or Hunter's hartebeest, with the savanna elephant and the African wild dog. The same document gives its vertebrates as 524 species in one paragraph and 544 in another.

The Italian administration made the area a game reserve, the Bubashi Absolute Reserve, in the early 1950s. Law No. 15 of 25 January 1969, on fauna, hunting and forest conservation, turned it into the BushBush Game Reserve and later a national park with rangers. When the state collapsed its infrastructure went too. Jubaland is working to revive it under its environment ministry.

Under the Tourism Act of 1984 the ministry had planned something larger: a tourist industry centred on Lag Badana National Park, which the submission pairs with Bushbushle, with nearby coral reefs and offshore islands, and a resort on a beach near Mogadishu. Britannica records that the reserves and parks have been neglected since the central government collapsed in 1991. A project of the federal Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, running from April 2026 to March 2032, aims to establish or improve 11 proposed terrestrial and marine protected areas.

Wikipedia's tourism list adds Daallo Mountain and Hargeisa National Park, the Cal Madow, Golis and Ogo ranges and two waterfalls. The highest point on the record, Shimbiris near Erigavo, is given there as 2,416 m, the height in Wikipedia's article on Somalia, and Britannica names the highest summit near Erigavo as Surud Cad, at about 2,408 m. Outside Hargeisa, Somalis in the region regard the twin hills of Naasa Hablood as a natural landmark.

What visitors carry and hear on the ground

The provisional constitution of 2012 makes Somali the official language, naming its two forms as Maay and Maxaa-tiri, and Arabic the second language. Somali has been officially written in a Latin alphabet since October 1972, and the alphabet uses every letter of the English one except p, v and z. Britannica's map spells the towns Hargeysa, Kismaayo and Boosaaso.

Little of the cash in use comes from the central bank. The Central Bank of Somalia states in its annual report for 2024 that it has issued no currency since 1991 and that the country has become a de facto dollarized economy. The BTI's 2026 report finds only a few shilling notes still in circulation, used mainly for small payments made face to face, and cites World Bank estimates that about 90% of the population use mobile banking while fewer than 20% use formal banks.

Traffic drives on the right, sockets take the Europlug at 220 V, and clocks keep UTC+03:00 all year with no summer time. The roads run to 22,100 km, of which 2,608 km were paved as of 2000, and a 750 km highway links Bosaso, Galkayo and Garowe in the north with the towns of the south.

Somali Airlines, the flag carrier founded in 1964, stopped flying in 1991, and private Somali carriers such as Daallo Airlines filled the gap. In February 2026 a new regional airline, Hilaac Air, began weekly flights connecting Hargeisa, Garowe and Mogadishu, and SalamAir opened the first direct route between Mogadishu and Muscat. From Somaliland's airports, African Express Airways and Ethiopian Airlines fly to Djibouti City, Addis Ababa, Dubai and Jeddah.