The Gedeo Cultural Landscape
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How it came to be
The Gedeo Cultural Landscape lies on the steep escarpments along the eastern edge of the Main Ethiopian Rift in southern Ethiopia. The Gedeo people who live here practise a multilayer agroforestry: large native trees shelter enset, the main food crop, and coffee and other shrubs grow beneath them. The farms are barely tilled and parts are left fallow, which protects the steep soils from erosion.
Within the cultivated slopes are sacred forests used for rituals of the Gedeo religion, where harvesting is forbidden. Along the ridges stand dense clusters of megalithic monuments, revered by the Gedeo and cared for by their elders. Thousands of stelae have been recorded at about 100 sites across the landscape; the largest are about 8 metres high and 1 metre across and depict human and phallic forms.
Evidence of occupation here goes back to the Neolithic, and the first European archaeological surveys of the area took place in the 1920s and 1930s. For its long history of settlement and its traditional agroforestry, the landscape was inscribed in 2023.
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