Somalia’s Coastline: The Tourism Case No One Is Making Yet

15

A fisherman in Eyl still reads the current the way his grandfather did, by watching where the light breaks on the water. Three hundred metres from where he stands, the reef drops into water so clear that a snorkeller can count fish without a mask fogging. There is no resort behind him, no beach bar, no dive operator. There is a coastline that runs for 3,333 kilometres, longer than Kenya’s, Tanzania’s and Mozambique’s put together, and almost none of it appears on a global tourist’s map.

That gap between what exists and what the world knows is Somalia’s coastline tourism potential. This is the case this piece makes: not that Somalia is safe in the way Zanzibar or the Seychelles are safe, but that the coastline itself, geologically, biologically, and commercially, is a tourism asset that the country’s ports, ministries, and investors have barely begun to price. 

A Coastline Longer Than the Distance From London to Moscow

According to the World Factbook, Somalia’s coastline is the longest in mainland Africa, running along the Gulf of Aden in the north and the Indian Ocean in the east and south, and is exceeded on the continent only by island-nation Madagascar. An earlier scientific survey put the figure closer to 3,025 kilometres depending on measurement method, with a continental shelf of roughly 32,500 square kilometres. Either measurement places Somalia well ahead of Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique combined.

The geography is not uniform. The northern Guban plain runs semi-arid and flat before giving way to the rugged Ogo Mountains near the Gulf of Aden. Cape Guardafui, at the tip of the Horn of Africa, marks the turn into the Indian Ocean coast, where the Bajuni Archipelago forms a chain of islets separated from the mainland by narrow channels, and where the Somali Current, one of the fastest western boundary currents in the world, feeds a marine ecosystem shared with Kenya and Tanzania. This is not scenery for its own sake. It is the physical infrastructure of a dive, sailing and sport-fishing industry that simply has not been built.

According to Horn Tribune, Somaliland, the self-declared northern territory that remains internationally unrecognised but administers itself separately from Mogadishu, controls roughly 850 kilometres of that northern coast along the Gulf of Aden. Berbera, its main coastal city, sits on one of the busiest shipping lanes on Earth; roughly 30% of global shipping traffic passes near the Bab el-Mandeb strait that Berbera faces. None of that traffic currently stops for a beach holiday.

Lido Beach and the Return of the Somali Tourist

A CNN Travel report of 2025 has it that Mogadishu’s Lido Beach is where the theory gets tested against reality. Roughly 10,000 international tourists visited Somalia in 2024, a 50% rise on 2023, according to the country’s Department of Tourism. Tour operator Untamed Borders ran 13 group trips to Mogadishu in 2025, up from two in 2023, driven largely by travellers pursuing “country-counting” goals rather than conventional beach holidays. 

On 1 September 2025, Somalia’s Immigration and Citizenship Agency made its new eVisa and Electronic Travel Authorisation system mandatory for foreign arrivals, replacing an ad hoc visa-on-arrival process at Aden Adde International Airport.

This is the story framework worth naming directly. Who carried Lido Beach into being as a tourism site: Italian colonial planners built it in the mid-twentieth century, but its modern life is carried by Mogadishu residents themselves and by small local operators such as Sahan Tourism, running guided boat trips and beach access since 2013. Why it mattered: for a generation of Somalis who grew up during the civil war, a public beach where families gather on Friday evenings is a statement about what normal life looks like, independent of whether a foreign visitor ever arrives. What it means today: that same resilience is now the product being sold to the outside world, whether or not Mogadishu intended it that way.

The risk sits alongside the recovery, not behind it. On 2 August 2024, al-Shabaab attacked the Beach View Hotel on Lido Beach with a suicide bombing followed by a mass shooting, killing more than 56 people, including six attackers. It was the fourth attack on that stretch of coast since 2016. Within a month, residents were back on the sand, and one man who lost a friend in the bombing told Xinhua that the group’s goal was to make the beach desolate and that Mogadishu would not let that happen. Both facts are true at once, and any honest account of Somalia’s coastline has to hold them together rather than choosing the convenient one.

What the Water Itself Is Worth

Strip away the politics, and the coastline is, on paper, one of the richest untouched marine assets on the Indian Ocean rim. Conservative estimates put Somalia’s annual marine fishery yield at 180,000 to 200,000 tonnes, with foreign and domestic vessels catching an estimated $260 million worth of fish in Somali waters in 2014 alone. Yet fisheries contribute only about 3% of exports and 2% of GDP, according to World Bank-cited figures. The same coastline holds coral reefs, seabird colonies and turtle nesting beaches that remain almost entirely unmapped for tourism purposes, and Somalia currently has no legally designated marine protected areas at all. That absence of protection is precisely why the tourism argument matters. A reef with no legal status and no ranger presence is a reef available to be dynamited for the next catch, not photographed by the next diver. Somalia has recently begun exchanging technical knowledge with Tanzania on coastal-tourism planning, an acknowledgement from Mogadishu that a functioning blue economy needs fisheries, conservation and tourism designed together rather than as competing claims on the same water.

The Security Ledger Somalia Cannot Talk Around.

No honest tourism case for Somalia’s coastline can skip the security accounting, because every investor and every airline route decision runs through it first. Globally, piracy fell to its lowest recorded level since 1992 in the first half of 2026, with just 38 incidents worldwide, down from 90 in the same period of 2025 and 60 in 2024. But the IMB attributed 94% of all crew hostage-taking worldwide in that same period to Somali pirate groups operating off the coast, warning that the capability to hijack vessels at distance has not gone away even as incident numbers fall.

On land, the picture is separate but connected. Al-Shabaab remains active in and around Mogadishu, and the United States maintains a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory citing terrorism, kidnapping and limited consular support, a position the United Kingdom broadly mirrors. Somaliland, by contrast, has built a reputation as the most stable part of the wider Somali territory, running its own government, currency and security apparatus since 1991 without recognition from any UN member state. That split matters for coastal tourism specifically: a visitor weighing Mogadishu’s Lido Beach against Berbera’s Gulf of Aden shoreline is, in practical terms, choosing between two different security environments under one contested flag.

ALSO READ:

• Tunisia’s Sahara Glamping Boom: Can Infrastructure Keep Pace With Demand?
• The  Africa First-Timer’s Planning Guide: What to  Book Early, What to Leave Flexible, and What Everyone Gets Wrong
• Okavango Delta 2026: A First-Timer’s Guide to Botswana’s Most Rewarding Safari

THE RCA POSITION

What Has to Happen Before the World Notices

Somalia’s coastline will not sell itself on geography alone, and pretending otherwise is how tourism strategies stall at the press-release stage. Four things need to move together.

First, marine protection needs a legal footing. According to a World Bank report of 2024, Somalia has no marine protected areas and no legislation governing them. Without that, there is no reef to build a dive economy around in a decade, whatever the security situation does.

Second, the visa system needs to be one system, not three. Mogadishu’s new eVisa applies only to arrivals through the federal government’s own ports of entry; Somaliland and Puntland have both declined to recognise it, so a traveller moving along the coast from Berbera to Mogadishu currently crosses more than one immigration regime inside what outsiders think of as a single country. A tourist product cannot scale across a border tourists cannot see.

Third, port investment has to widen its purpose. DP World’s roughly $440 million redevelopment of Berbera has tripled container capacity and cut regional transport costs by an estimated $8.4 million in 2024 alone. That is a logistics success story with no tourism component attached yet — no cruise berth, no beachfront concession, no linked airport upgrade aimed at leisure travel rather than cargo.

Fourth, the security narrative needs precision rather than avoidance. Blanket “Do Not Travel” advisories treat Berbera and central Mogadishu as identical risk zones when the operating environments are demonstrably different. Somalia’s federal and Somaliland tourism authorities both have an interest in pushing international advisories toward district-level rather than country-level risk assessments, the way Kenya’s coastal advisories already distinguish Lamu’s border areas from Diani’s beaches.

Somalia will not convert its coastline into meaningful tourism revenue until it treats coastal security, port-linked tourism infrastructure and marine conservation as one connected investment case rather than three separate ministries working in isolation, because the countries that have built durable coastal tourism economies, from Tanzania to Mauritius, did exactly the opposite of what Somalia is currently doing: they professionalised protection before they marketed the beach.

Impact on Africa’s and Nigeria’s Tourism Sectors

Somalia’s coastline case is not an isolated story; it is a stress test for how the rest of the continent thinks about underused coastal assets. Africa holds some of the longest, least commercialised shorelines on Earth, and Somalia’s experience – an extraordinary natural endowment paired with weak institutional protection – is the same pattern playing out at a smaller scale in parts of Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and even Nigeria’s own coastal states. 

If Somalia manages to convert reef law and port investment into a working tourism product, it becomes a reference case for African Union blue economy planning, which already frames ocean-based tourism as central to continental growth strategy. If it fails, it becomes another example of resource wealth without the governance to capture it, reinforcing the perception gap that keeps international capital flowing to a handful of familiar destinations – Cape Town, Zanzibar, and the Seychelles – rather than spreading across the continent’s coastline.

For Nigeria specifically, the lesson is closer to home than it might appear. Nigeria’s roughly 850-kilometre Atlantic coastline, running from Lagos through the Niger Delta to Cross River, carries comparable underuse: strong domestic beach culture, virtually no international dive or marine tourism infrastructure, and a security narrative, largely tied to the Niger Delta and offshore piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, that has depressed foreign interest for two decades. 

Nigeria’s tourism authorities watching Somalia’s coastal recovery should note what is driving the early gains: not a marketing campaign but a visa system that actually works and a diaspora willing to travel first. Nigeria has both the diaspora numbers and the coastline; what it has lacked is the same institutional sequencing this piece argues Somalia needs: protection and infrastructure before promotion.

Somalia’s coastline is one story in a continent full of them. If this kind of reporting, the kind that looks past the postcard and asks what a place actually needs to become a destination, is useful to you, RCA covers 54 countries with the same standard. Explore the archive, and come back for the next one.

 

FAQs

1. Is it currently safe to visit Somalia’s coastline as a tourist?

It depends entirely on where. Mogadishu remains under a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory from the US State Department because of terrorism and kidnapping risk, and attacks have occurred on Lido Beach as recently as August 2024. Somaliland’s coastal areas, including Berbera, are generally considered more stable, though still unrecognised internationally and subject to their own travel guidance. Anyone considering a trip should consult current government advisories and travel with an established operator rather than independently.

2. Why is Somalia’s coastline considered tourism potential rather than a functioning tourism destination?

Because the physical assets- 3,333 kilometres of coastline, coral reefs, marine biodiversity, historic port towns- exist and are documented, but the supporting infrastructure does not: no marine protected areas, a fragmented visa system across Mogadishu, Somaliland and Puntland, and minimal tourism-specific investment even where port infrastructure like Berbera has been modernised.

3. How many tourists currently visit Somalia?

Around 10,000 international visitors in 2024, according to Somalia’s Department of Tourism, a 50% increase on 2023. This remains a niche, adventure-travel-driven number rather than a mainstream tourism flow.

4. What is the difference between visiting Mogadishu and visiting Somaliland?

They operate under separate governments, currencies and, since September 2025, separate visa systems. Somaliland has maintained internal stability since declaring self-governance in 1991, while Mogadishu and southern Somalia continue to face active al-Shabaab activity. Practically, this means different entry requirements, different security environments and different levels of tourism infrastructure.

5. What would need to change for Somalia’s coastline to attract mainstream international tourism?

Four things, in sequence: legal protection for marine areas and reefs, a unified entry system across Somalia’s federal and semi-autonomous regions, tourism-specific investment layered onto existing port infrastructure, and more precise, district-level international travel advisories rather than blanket country warnings.