The lively modern city of Bahir Dar boasts a balmy tropical climate and a geographically poignant setting where the Blue Nile exits Lake Tana. It is the normal base for day trips to the spectacular Blue Bile Falls and for exploring Lake Tana, a beautiful 1,200-square-mile inland sea whose islands and peninsulas hosts a wealth of atmospheric old monasteries.
Discover Bahir Dar
A great selection of restaurants and traditional music venues ensure that Bahir Dar is rivalled only by Addis Ababa when it comes to an enjoyable nightlife.
Listed as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, Lake Tana is renowned for its rich birdlife and it also hosts plenty of hippos. A good place to see these is Bezawit Hill on the outskirts of Bahir Dar.
The Blue Nile Falls, known locally as Tis Isat (Smoking Water), is most sensational in the rainy season, when it kicks up a thunderous wall of spray as it crashes 150ft into a narrow frothing gorge. The footpath to the waterfall crosses a Portuguese bridge dating to 1626.
Among the most beautiful of Lake Tana’s medieval monasteries is Ura Kidane Mihret, with its lavishly painted interior and fabulous forested location on the Zege Peninsula.
Several other more remote island churches are worth a visit. Tana Chirkos hosts a trio of ancient Judaic sacrificial pillars that substantiate the claim it once housed the Ark of the Covenant, while the mausoleum on Daga Istafanos contains the mummified remains of five Ethiopian emperors.
