Socotra in November

Getting there, and what is open

November is described in the best-time guide as the first fully reliable month of the season, with numbers building rather than peaking. If your dates are movable, it is the month that buys the most reliability for the least competition.

Sea and wind

November gives back some of October's calm. The mean wind rises to 19.4 km/h from 13.5, close to January's 21.2, and it rises again in December before falling away towards the April low.

Rainfall is 20 mm, the highest of the twelve months and about a seventh of the 131 mm this grid cell takes in a year. Days average 28.9 C, nights 24.7 C, and humidity is 68 percent.

Bloom and wildlife

November is one of the two windows named by the only specialist birding source in the corpus, the other being April to May. Wadi Ayhaft is the site it gives for the Socotra golden-winged grosbeak and the Socotra sunbird, and the coastal lagoons for waders. Eleven strict endemics are on the island's list. The Socotra chameleon is in the second half of its October to November mating season, when the males are most visible.

November also carries the island's hardest recent conservation fact. Cyclones Chapala and Megh struck in November 2015 and killed about 38 percent of the frankincense population at Homhil outright, with a further 29 percent dying over the two years that followed. Boswellia elongata was uplisted to Endangered in 2025, and overgrazing is preventing the saplings that would replace those trees. Socotra holds eleven of the world's twenty-four frankincense species, and nine of its eleven are now Endangered or Critically Endangered.

Photography

The post-monsoon green in the dragon blood forests can last into November, which the calendar calls a short and rare window. Make the forests and the canyons the priority while it holds, and leave the long compressed views for later in the season, when haze and humidity are both lower.

The evenings come early. Sunsets in the middle of November are the earliest of the year, close to 16:55, about an hour before the latest sunsets of midsummer, so plan the golden-hour stop rather than meeting it on the road.