Homhil Protected Area

The three trees

Dragon's blood is the one people come for. The bottle tree — Adenium obesum subsp. socotranum, an endemic subspecies named for its swollen water-storing trunk — is the one that surprises them, flowering pink out of what looks like bare rock. Frankincense, Boswellia, is the one almost nobody photographs, which is unfortunate given it is the one in the most trouble.

Homhil is the only stop on a standard itinerary where all three stand within sight of each other.

The frankincense count

*Boswellia elongata on Homhil fell from 1,187 trees in 1956 to 264 in 2017, with no seedlings at all outside fenced areas*. That is a 78% decline in six decades and a population with no replacement generation.

The 2015 cyclones made it worse in a week: fieldworkers recorded Homhil losing 50% of its frankincense trees broken or uprooted, with a further 25% crown-damaged.

A place that is being managed well

The 2025 UNESCO/IUCN mission singled out Homhil — alongside Di-Hamri and Rosh — as a positive example of community co-management, with rapid impact assessments, controlled visitation and equitable benefit-sharing. Elsewhere on the island the mission found community organisations holding only informal roles without formal authority.

If your itinerary is flexible, asking for Homhil time is a substantive request rather than a symbolic one: it directs money to one of the few places where the governance actually works.

The resin

Frankincense and dragon's blood resin are both still harvested here, and families will sometimes demonstrate the cut and the bleed if they are working when you arrive. Buying resin directly is one of the few ways tourist money reaches a household without passing through anyone else first.

The pool

The natural rock pool on the plateau's northern edge sits above a drop to the coastal plain, which is why photographs of it read as an infinity pool. It is small, it is shared, and in a dry year it is shallow. The walk out to it is short but exposed and there is no published walking time; by mid-morning it is warm work.

It is worth knowing that a study of 410 international visitors found very little interest in Socotra's cultural heritage and heavy interest in beaches and dragon trees. The pool is the reason many people have Homhil on their itinerary at all — and the trees fifty metres behind it are the reason the place is protected.

Why asking for Homhil is a real request

Most of Socotra's protected areas are governed on paper by a zoning plan from 2000 that the 2025 mission found is violated without consequence, by an authority whose Hadibu office was occupied from 2017 to 2024, under a management plan that expired in 2008 and has never been replaced.

Homhil is one of three places — with Di-Hamri and Rosh — where the mission found something different: rapid impact assessments, controlled visitation and equitable benefit-sharing, with the community holding a real role rather than an informal one. Time spent here, and money spent here, lands somewhere the governance actually works. That is not true everywhere on the island.