‘Galápagos of the Indian Ocean’

The Socotra Archipelago World Heritage site (Yemen) is situated in the Western Indian Ocean, a 250 km long archipelago about 100 km east of the Horn of Africa and 380 km south of the Arabian Peninsula. From west to east, the archipelago is made up of the islands Abd al Kuri (133 km2), ‘The Brothers’ Samha (41 km2) and Darsa (17 km2) and finally Socotra, the easternmost and largest island of the group, covering some 3,625 km2 of land surface (Cheung and DeVantier, 2006; Banfield et al., 2011). Socotra is about 1,550 m at its highest point in the Haggeher mountains and most of its surface consists of elevated limestone plateaus, bordered by coastal areas and a central depression.

The island of Darsa and a few barren islets are uninhabited by man, yet serve as important sites for large populations of Socotra Cormorant and other seabirds. Despite its proximity to Africa and the fact that it is biogeographically considered a part of this continent, the archipelago lies on a micro- continent (the Socotra Platform), which geologically belongs to Southern Arabia and which has been separated from it by a deep sea (the Gulf of Aden) for at least 18 million years (Cheung and DeVantier, 2006; Van Damme, 2009). Like the Seychelles, the base of this archipelago is made up of ancient granite that once belonged to Gondwanaland.