Shibam (often referred to as Shibam Hadhramaut) is a town in Yemen. It is famous for its mudbrick-made high-rise buildings. Shibam, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, owes its fame to its distinct architecture. Often called "the oldest skyscraper city in the world" or "the Manhattan of the desert", Shibam is one of the oldest and best examples of urban planning based on the principle of vertical construction. The city has some of the tallest mud buildings in the world, with some of them over 30 meters (100 feet) high, thus being early high-rise apartment buildings.
The nearby town of Tarim contains the tallest structure in the Wadi Hadhramaut valley, the mudbrick minaret of the Al-Mihdhar mosque. It stands at a height of approximately 53 meters (175 feet.) This is the tallest minaret in the southern Arabian peninsula.
