A strategic location on the Red Sea afforded the city centuries of trading dominance -- and makes it a coveted target in today's fighting in the Middle East. Coffee farmers spreading fermented coffee cherries on drying beds in Haraz, Yemen, in 2025. The port city of Mokha rose to prominence through the Yemeni coffee trade.

Long before it was captured by Houthi forces this week in Yemen's civil war, the centuries-old Red Sea port of Mokha was famed as one of the original gateways of the global coffee trade. At its height, from the 16th to 18th centuries, the city was a wealthy hub of merchants and coffee houses in a region that oversaw a monopoly on the world's coffee bean supply for more than a hundred years. That legacy stretches into modern coffee culture, with the city giving its name to coffee beans, specialty products and the mocha, a chocolate and espresso drink.

Some of the traits that allowed Mokha to dominate the coffee trade centuries ago have also made it a strategic -- and coveted -- prize in the current conflict in Yemen. Mokha's proximity to the Bab el-Mandab Strait, a narrow waterway about 50 miles south of the city that links the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, has for centuries given it leverage over one of the world's most important trade corridors. The Ottoman Turks occupied Yemen in the late 1530s, and transformed Mokha from a small fishing village into a coffee superpower.

Coffee already had a foothold in the region. About a century earlier, scholars believe, people there were the first to consume a drink that modern coffee drinkers would recognize. The practice may have started with Arab Sufi monks, who drank the stimulating beverage to stay awake for midnight prayers.

By the mid-1500s, coffee drinking had become widespread in the area, which saw a number of other coffee firsts. Yemen is the home not only of the social habit of drinking coffee as the beverage that we know today, it's also the home of large-scale coffee cultivation and really the first purveyor of coffee to the world, said Nancy Um, the author of The Merchant Houses of Mocha, about the city's trade history. In Yemen, the Turks began cultivating coffee on a commercial scale in the highlands around Mokha and exported it throughout their empire.

They also established a monopoly, banning coffee beans from leaving Yemen unless they were first boiled or roasted to prevent germination. Mokha's population of multiethnic and multifaith traders moved products including metals, textiles and spices, but it became heavily associated with coffee in the 17th century, when major European trading houses, including the East India Companies of England and the Netherlands, set up shop there. By the 1720s, however, coffee was being cultivated in the Caribbean and in Java, Indonesia, and Mokha's central role diminished.

Its death knell came in the early 1800s when the British took Aden, a port city to the east, and made it their main trade hub in the region.