Faifa Mountains

The terraces of Faifa are stacked so steeply that each house's roof is level with the next house's foundation — a vertical village where smoke from one chimney drifts through a neighbour's window. Morning mist fills the valley below while the uppermost terraces catch sunlight, and the effect is of a settlement hovering between earth and cloud. The air smells of coffee — real Arabian coffee, from bushes that still grow on these slopes.

The Faifa Mountains rise in Saudi Arabia's Jizan region, their slopes carved into terraces so steep that the agriculture appears to defy gravity. The terracing system is centuries old, supporting crops of coffee and fruit on gradients that would be considered unbuildable elsewhere. Faifa is one of the last places in the Arabian Peninsula where coffee is still cultivated — the plants descended from the original Arabian coffee stock that once supplied the world. The winding road to the summit has over 50 hairpin bends, and the villages along it display a distinct architectural tradition of stone houses stepped into the mountainside. The isolation — both geographical and cultural — has preserved a way of life that the modernisation of lowland Saudi Arabia has largely overtaken.