Asmara, the capital, sits at 2,325 meters on a plateau that feels like the edge of the world. Italy built most of what you see between 1890 and 1941, treating Eritrea as the showpiece colony - Colonia Primogenita, the First-Born. Mussolini's architects filled the streets with cubist cinemas, streamlined gas stations, and futurist railway terminals. The Fiat Tagliero Building, shaped like an airplane with concrete wings that cantilever 15 meters into the air, still looks like something out of a graphic novel. In 2017, UNESCO declared Asmara a World Heritage Site for its well-preserved modernist urbanism. More traffic lights than Rome had when the city was being built, according to one often-quoted claim. Wide boulevards. Palm-lined piazzas. Italian is still spoken, more by older Eritreans than by the 100,000 Italians who once lived here and then left after World War II.

Beyond Asmara, the land drops off dramatically to the Red Sea. The port of Massawa, 115 kilometers down a mountain road, sits on coral islands connected by causeways. The old Ottoman, Egyptian, and Italian quarters still stand, many buildings pocked by shrapnel from the 1991 Ethiopian bombing raids. Offshore lies the Dahlak Archipelago, hundreds of islands of which only four are inhabited, surrounded by some of the most pristine reefs in the Red Sea. Dugongs glide between manta rays. Tiger fish move in schools. Hammerhead sharks patrol the outer edges. Ethiopian tanks and ships, dumped here in 1991 when the Eritrean rebels finally won, have become artificial reefs. Getting there requires chartering a boat from Massawa - one of maybe three licensed operators, all of them expensive, most of them European-run. The coral has never been bleached by mass tourism because there has never been mass tourism.

The national currency is named after a town. Nakfa sits high in the rugged Sahel mountains of northern Eritrea, 2,000 meters above the coastal desert, and it is where the Eritrean People's Liberation Front made its base during the long war against Ethiopia. From 1975 to 1988, Nakfa was leveled repeatedly by bombing raids and rebuilt each time underground. The rebels built schools, clinics, printing presses, and workshops in caves and trenches. They called it the liberated area. A modest war museum in Nakfa commemorates the struggle today, and a comfortable government-run hotel welcomes the rare tourist who makes the bone-jarring drive from Keren. The town's name became the currency's name because, for the fighters, Nakfa was where Eritrea became possible.

Eastern Christianity reached this region around the middle of the fourth century, when it was part of the Kingdom of Aksum. Some of the monasteries date from that era or not long after. Debre Bizen, founded in 1361 on a hilltop overlooking the route from Asmara to Massawa, is still active. Women are forbidden from entering - a rule that has held for over six centuries - but men can hike up for the views and the library, which contains manuscripts hundreds of years old. Debre Sina, another hilltop monastery, draws thousands of pilgrims once a year. The Aksumite ruins at Qohaito, partially destroyed in the 1998-2000 war with Ethiopia, still scatter the plateau south of Asmara: stelae, tombs, a hilltop temple called Grat Be'al Gebri where the wind never stops.

Understand what Eritrea is before going. One political party, the People's Front for Democracy and Justice, has ruled since independence in 1993. No national elections have ever been held. Obligatory military service lasts eight years. Half the population lives on less than a dollar a day. Press Freedom Indexes consistently rank Eritrea last. In September 2018, Eritrea signed a peace treaty with Ethiopia, ending the war that had defined the country for two decades. Some restrictions have loosened. Some have tightened. The Eritreans you meet will be unfailingly kind, will share their meal, will walk you three blocks to find the place you are looking for. They live under one of the world's most repressive governments and they will still offer you coffee. Travel here carrying that contradiction. Let both sides of it be true.