Senafe is known for the ruins of Metera (also known as Balaw Kalaw), Qohayto to the south, and for Kaskase to the north. The soil is derived from volcanic ignimbrite,[1] and Senafe sits on the southeastern edge of a twenty kilometer wide caldera.
During his reconnaissance work for the 1868 British Expedition to Abyssinia (expedition against Emperor Tewodros II), Clements Markham visited Senafe, finding it situated "at the foot of the grand mass of sandstone rock about half a mile north-west of the camp, called Amba-Adana." The town itself consisted "of about a dozen houses built of rough stones and mud, with flat roofs branches being placed in rows across the beams, and covered with mud. Broken jars plastered into the roof, serve as chimneys." He estimated the population to be around 240 inhabitants.[5][6]
^Zanettin, Bruno; Bellieni, Giuliano; Visentin, Eleonora Justin (2006). "Stratigraphy and evolution of the trachy-rhyolitic volcanism of the Senafe area (Eastern Eritrean Plateau)". Journal of African Earth Sciences. 45 (4/5): 478–488. doi:10.1016/j.jafrearsci.2006.04.004.
^Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopian Borderlands (Larenceville: Red Sea, 1997), p. 92
^Bruce, ''Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1805 edition), vol. 3, p. 362
^Richard Pankhurst, History of Ethiopian Towns: From the Middle Ages to the Early Nineteenth Century (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1982), vol. 1 p. 231.
