Projects and editorial standards
The guide, local collaborations, and independent organizations we believe are worth knowing.
Worshippers gathered in Lalibela, where the churches remain part of daily religious life.
About the guide
Lalibela is often introduced through its eleven rock-hewn churches. They are one part of a larger place: an active sacred landscape, a highland town, and an Ethiopian Orthodox community shaped by worship, pilgrimage, craft, hospitality, and everyday work.
This independent guide brings those parts together for readers learning from afar and for visitors who want to arrive with useful context. Living Lalibela is also the home of the projects connected to that work. It is not a registered charity, public authority, or community organization.
Current work
Each project names who leads it, what it does, and how readers can check the information for themselves.
Published and growing
Seventy-six focused guides bring together the churches, faith, town, highlands, and practical details of a visit. Historical claims are sourced, changing information is dated, and uncertainty is stated plainly.
Read how the guide is made
Active and locally led
Plan directly with Sisay Ayele Haile, a Lalibela-based guide. His page covers his experience, suggested routes, photography, and contact details without placing an agency between guide and traveler.
Meet Sisay
Producing locally
Getachew Sale Mezgebu is developing locally processed honey and other hive products with beekeepers from Lalibela and the northern highlands. Our profile explains the range and the current direct-order process.
Meet Lalibela Honey
Independent foundation profiled here
A Swiss foundation with two decades of work in Lalibela across health, housing, education, livelihoods, and direct community support. Our independent profile uses the foundation’s published reporting and links each project to its source.
Explore the foundation’s work
Practical guidance
A practical guide to keeping visitor spending local, choosing accountable organizations, protecting children, and judging future initiatives by their leadership, safeguards, budget, and public reporting.
Read the support guideHow it began
The project began after Antonin Cohen visited Lalibela in 2025 and returned with photographs, field notes, and relationships formed in the town. His visit explains the origin of the guide, but it does not define Lalibela.
The guide is intended to grow through research, local expertise, responsible travel practice, and contributions from people who know Lalibela firsthand. Personal essays remain clearly identified as individual experience.
Editorial standards
Useful travel writing should show what is known, where it came from, and what still needs to be checked.
Historical and heritage claims are checked against UNESCO, published scholarship, conservation organizations, and Ethiopian sources where available. Prices, routes, access, and other practical details are dated because they change.
Lalibela contains all three. When accounts differ, including the age or construction sequence of individual churches, the guide explains the disagreement instead of presenting one interpretation as settled fact.
The churches are active places of worship. The guide gives religious practice its context and asks visitors to follow the direction of clergy, guides, and worshippers.
A local guide, hotel, restaurant, or organization may be included because it is useful to readers or supports the local economy. Personal relationships and commercial arrangements are disclosed. A feature is never presented as official endorsement.
Independence
Lalibela Guide is not operated by UNESCO, the Ethiopian government, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, or a tourism authority. Its job is to research carefully, credit sources, distinguish personal experience from documented fact, and correct errors.
Local perspectives, corrections, and stronger sources are welcome. The guide should improve as its understanding grows.
Support and accountability