Can the “Galápagos of the Arabian Sea” Survive Its Popularity?

Towering pale dunes that tumble from craggy limestone peaks to crystalline turquoise water. Fields of frankincense and myrrh trees. Primordial forests that are the last relics of an otherworldly ecosystem that once covered much of the planet.

These are some of the natural wonders that await visitors to Socotra, a Yemeni island roughly the size of Delaware that is known for its astonishing landscapes and biodiversity. Many species on Socotra, located just east of the Horn of Africa and about 240 miles south of mainland Yemen, occur nowhere else in the world. Today, the “Galápagos of the Middle East,” as it’s nicknamed, is marketed as a lost paradise by tour companies, travel publications, and social media influencers.

The travel industry began taking root in the early 2000s, following construction of an all-weather airstrip and expanded airport. In 2020, a popular YouTuber, Eva zu Beck, got stuck in Socotra during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and interest picked up. In early January, the island made headlines for a less appealing reason when flights were grounded due to fighting on mainland Yemen between two rival political groups, causing around 600 tourists to be stranded for about a week. (Throughout the incident, Socotra remained peaceful.)

The island, which has a population of about 100,000, now sees around 5,000 annual tourists. Those numbers are likely to grow. A United Arab Emirates (UAE) charter company that brings most foreigners to the island recently announced that it will increase its flights—which book out months in advance and are contracted with Air Arabia—from three to four times per week. This would exert further strain on delicate ecosystems suffering from climate change, including from negative impacts by tourists’ campfires, vehicles, and waste. (Socotra has only rudimentary waste disposal services and zero recycling. Plastic waste that makes it to the island’s dump is burned, but much of the garbage finds its way into the environment.)

Individual visitors cannot solve these problems, but they can mitigate their impact. Before leaving for a trip to Socotra, I announced to the seven friends I was traveling with that I’d be bringing all my recyclables back to Abu Dhabi, and that I hoped they would join me in this experiment. The result was something wholly unexpected.

Photo by Indi_kator/Shutterstock

When I learned of Socotra from a friend’s Facebook post in 2023, I assumed that the Yemeni island—150 miles south of the mainland—must be difficult to reach. Yet booking the trip was straightforward. Tour companies take care of most of the organizing, including the visa and round-trip ticket from Abu Dhabi. (Tourists cannot buy their own airfare; they must go instead as part of a package deal.) As of February 3, flights will leave from Jeddah instead of Abu Dhabi and be operated by Yemenia Airways rather than Air Arabia.

The biggest challenge was picking a company. I settled on Socotra Specialty Tours because two of its three co-owners are Socotrans. The company also seemed more committed to the environment than other groups: Its travel guide included 12 pages about the island’s flora and fauna and nearly as many about environmental problems ranging from pollution to overgrazing by goats.

In the lead-up to my visit, the company got embroiled in some plastic-related drama. It had hosted an Instagram influencer who posted a video showing a Socotra street covered in garbage. “He was not rude, he was not disrespectful,” says Taylor Dees, Socotra Specialty Tours’ Texan co-owner, who lives in Abu Dhabi. “He was just saying, ‘This was my first impression and wow, I did not expect this,’” based on the photos he had seen prior to his trip.

The video went viral, and when Socotrans saw it, the company began catching major flak—including from a top government official. (The company asked to refrain from naming him for fear of further blowback.) Rather than take the video as a sign that the garbage issue needed to be addressed, the official retaliated by announcing that he would stop signing the company’s drone permits and future visa applications.

The official wound up backing down from his threats. Still, the incident illustrated the resistance there is to acknowledging and dealing with the garbage problem. But there are legitimate constraints. The authorities on Socotra are primarily aligned with Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council, a separatist group that—until January—controlled much of the mainland’s south.

In the recent fighting, though, the council lost its leadership and ceded much of its territory to government forces, and now appears poised to collapse. Socotra’s political fate, as a result, is even more uncertain. “Socotrans have been living for a decade without a truly functioning state, during conflict and with limited means of income,” said Nathalie Peutz, a professor of anthropology at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus. “Garbage may not be their priority due to the many other resource constraints they have.”

The eight of us landed at the island’s small airport on a sunny November morning and were greeted by Aamer Thani, our amicable guide. He handed out reusable water bottles and explained that we would fill them throughout our trip from water cooler jugs that the company uses in lieu of single-use plastics.

We passed through the plastic-littered streets of Hadiboh, the capital, as the afternoon call to prayer began, then continued along a coastal road. All of Socotra’s travel companies, no matter how “exclusive” they claim to be, stay at the same 10 or so tourist-approved campsites and visit the same locations.

Photo by mishamartin/Shutterstock (L); photo by Andrew Svk/Unsplash (R)

At a stop to take photos of bottle trees, I noticed many had been defaced by people carving their names into the trunks. At Arher Beach, our first camping spot on the four-night itinerary, the warm Arabian Sea reflected fluffy cumulous clouds and the blue sky overhead. But plastic jutting out of the sand tainted the idyllic scenery. I began collecting garbage from around our campsite, and before long, my arms were overflowing.

When Thani saw what I was doing, he rushed over to help. “I’ve never seen a tourist picking up trash before!” he said. Later, he told me our joint mission had given him an idea. Why not ask all tourists to voluntarily take their rubbish with them off the island? “We have a community of guides,” he said. “I should talk to them so they can share this idea with their tourists, too.”

The following day we continued to Firmhin, the famed dragon’s blood tree forest. On the steep approach, at first, we saw only lone dragon’s blood trees here and there. But then we crested a ridge to a vista unlike any other on Earth: deep canyon walls of layered rock with stacked plateaus topped with hundreds and hundreds of dragon’s blood trees, their crowns spreading like umbrellas to catch the late afternoon sun.

This ecosystem is under serious threat from global warming; extended droughts weaken trees and then turbocharged cyclones topple them. The standing dragon’s blood trees are 300 years old, on average—which doesn’t bode well for the survival of a species that takes over a century to mature. Younger trees are rare because free-ranging goats, of which there are an estimated 480,000, gobble up seedlings before they can grow.

Kay Van Damme, a Belgian biologist who has conducted research on Socotra since 1999, has worked with local partners to set up fenced enclosures to exclude goats from the landscape. A visit to one of these sites revealed a stark difference: within the fence, the ground was lush with new sprouts and young, twiggy trees. Just outside, the earth was picked over and almost barren. “We can’t fence the entire island, but in this way, we can really see what’s possible without goat grazing,” Van Damme later told me. “There are hundreds of young trees which now have a chance of surviving.” Tourists, he added, could donate to support such restoration initiatives—if only they were informed of them.

On our last night in Firmhin, we ate dinner beneath the crown of a 500-year-old dragon’s blood tree and slept under the clear night sky, with the Milky Way’s incandescent expanse twinkling above. The tranquility and timelessness of the scenery created an almost mystical experience. Yet our presence was inevitably going to leave this place a bit worse off than how we found it. Dust from so many vehicles is causing already-stressed flora near the road to weaken further, and some tourists are harming trees by making bonfires too close to their shallow roots. Sanitation is also an issue. The morning after our night in the forest, a staff member emptied the chemically treated sewage from our portable toilet behind a rock rather than into a wastewater system or septic tank.

Some of these problems may soon be alleviated. To protect Firmhin, officials from Socotra’s Environmental Protection Agency have proposed a new rule forbidding tourists from camping within the forest. Instead, they would take day trips by foot. Some tour operators and others who make money from the tourism industry are afraid this might impact their bottom lines; others on the island welcome the suggestion. “Tourists are camping everywhere in the protected area,” said Mohammed Amar, a manager of the Socotra endangered-tree project who has assisted tourists and visiting scientists like Van Damme for more than 25 years. “They’re disturbing nature.”

Amar continued, “In the past, we had real ecotourism, but now, lots of flights are coming, and mass tourism has started. We’re getting more money, but we’ve lost many things about our culture and nature.”

Photo by Jiri Soural/Shutterstock

My friends had been good sports about my plastic campaign. My sister, who was on the trip, even pitched in to help on a beach cleanup at Detwah Lagoon—an expanse of brilliant white sandbars, turquoise lagoons, and raucous bird life. Afterward, another friend and a random Socotran teenager helped us crush the bottles so we could tightly pack as many as possible into bags for transport back to the UAE.

But the island had one final lesson. At the Socotra airport the next morning, our five bags of recyclables were stopped as they went through the first security check to enter the building. An Air Arabia employee informed me that “garbage on the aircraft is not allowed.” I tried to push back—Where, exactly, was this rule stated?—but the plastic, he informed us, would be staying on the island. (Air Arabia did not respond to requests for comment about whether recyclables are forbidden on their planes.)

We emptied the plastic into a garbage bin labeled “recyclables.” The airline’s refusal suddenly made Thani’s seemingly simple proposal—to ask tourists to take the plastic they generate back with them to the mainland—appear perhaps untenable. It was a disappointing, unexpected end to the trip, but a reminder that even modest, well-intentioned solutions can falter without the full buy-in of everyone involved.

As the plane took off, I considered that the fantasy version of Socotra presented on social media never existed. Yet the real Socotra—complicated, fragile, and irreplaceable—is far richer. Whether it becomes the next destination loved to death by those drawn to the very things their presence destroys is up to all of us, Socotrans and travelers alike.