Beyond the famous gingerbread facades, Sana'a keeps its culture indoors: imam's palaces turned museums, a 16th-century caravanserai full of craftsmen, and UNESCO-listed San'ani song sung to oud and copper turbi in upstairs rooms.
Yemen's national collection fills a seven-storey former imam's palace on Tahrir Square: Sabaean alabaster funerary heads, Himyarite bronzes, Awwam temple inscriptions and an ethnography floor of silver and Qur'an manuscripts.
A restored Ottoman-era samsarah (caravanserai) off Suq al-Milh, now workshops and exhibition rooms around a stone courtyard. Watch qamariya makers cut alabaster and coloured glass into the fanlights that light every tower house.
Built in 1597 by the Ottoman governor Hasan Pasha, this is Sana'a's only classical Ottoman mosque: a single hemispherical dome on squinches over a square hall, in dressed grey stone rather than the local brick-and-gypsum idiom.
The 17th-century garden suburb west of the walls, where Turkish officials and Sana'a's Jewish community built lower, plainer houses with wide takhrim plaster tracery. Qa' al-Yahud's lanes still show pre-1949 doorways and mikveh cisterns.
A tower house in the Old City furnished room by room as a San'ani home: a bridal chamber with silver jewellery and gargush headdresses, kitchen with clay ovens, and a top-floor mafraj set for coffee and incense.
Independent arts foundation running exhibitions, film screenings and music workshops for young Yemeni painters, photographers and oud students since 2007. Programming is irregular and announced days ahead on their Facebook page.
Housed in a Turkish-era barracks block, this is as much political theatre as museum: Ottoman and Zaydi imamate weapons, the 1962 revolution rooms, captured armour in the yard and hand-painted battle dioramas from the 1970s.
The city's cultural centre hall hosts recitals of al-ghina al-San'ani, the UNESCO-listed song tradition pairing Humayni poetry with qanbus lute and copper turbi drum, plus poetry evenings and school theatre.
The five-storey Rock Palace built for Imam Yahya in the 1930s on a sandstone pillar, its lower floors cut into the rock itself. Inside: narrow stairs, a well shaft through the stone, kitchens and a mafraj over the wadi's vineyards.
An Ottoman summer retreat 8 km north, once the imams' vineyard town: the domed al-Rawdah Mosque, a small covered suq of dye and grape traders, and mud-walled bustan gardens between whitewashed houses.
A near-abandoned fortified village on a rock outcrop 5 km south, settled by Jewish silversmiths and farmers for centuries. Stone houses grow straight out of the cliff; a single stepped path climbs through the gate to the ruined synagogue quarter.
One of about a dozen surviving Old City bathhouses, vaulted and lit by glass roof discs, still wood-and-dung fired. Beside it lie the miqshamah — walled market gardens fertilised by the hammams and irrigated from mosque cisterns.