Map - Teseney

Teseney (تسني, ተሰነይ), also spelled Tessenei or Tesseney, is a market town in western Eritrea. It lies south-east of Kassala in Sudan, on the Gash River. The city was much fought over in the Eritrean War of Independence during which much of it was destroyed. After the war, Tessenei has become a governmental administrative center with customs and agricultural offices and a military base.

Teseney is located 45 kilometers from the Sudanese border and approximately 115 kilometers beyond Barentu administrative or central administration of Gash Barka region. It is considered a frontier town on western Eritrea and many calls a land port because of its location and movements of people and goods from Sudan to Eritrea and vice versa. The town is made up of people of various ethnic backgrounds and most used language is the Arabic language because of the border and most of the people get back home from Sudan (people who left Eritrea due to the War with Ethiopia for Independence). On the outskirts of Teseney to the north are a couple of hills from which there are exceptional views of the lowlands and mountains in Sudan. Also, farmers have been reporting of lions roaring in south of Teseney. In summer 2006, a young male lion was sighted and photographed, but since then, there has been no sighting and farmers do still report lions roars being echoed in the night. Monkeys and spotted hyenas form also part of Tessenei fauna, while acacia and Hyphaene thebaica palm locally known as Dom trees dominate its flora.

The name Tessenei with the diminutive of Seney (seni means nice/good in Tigre Eritrean language) or Teseney, which means “let it be nice to dwell”. It is also called Sabbot by its native local inhabitants. In 1929, it was called by the Italian colonizers the Village of Gasperini (named after the former colonial governor of Eritrea, a native of Treviso in Italy).

Tessenei, is divided into several "Hillas" or districts / quarters, inhabited by different ethnic groups. There is in fact the Hillat Takarin which accommodates the ethnic group Takrour (originally emigrated Hausa and other clans from Nigeria hundreds of years ago), the Hillat Sudan (refers to the Sudanese community in the town) Hillat Halabit (inhabited by Beni Amer pastoralists); Hillat Somal (inhabited by Somalis, in the trading centre), built around a hill of granite blocks, just over 100 meter high, which separates it from the Hillat Takarin. There is small river that flows into the Gash: The stream Tadalay. Behind the hill runs an irrigation canal that takes water from the Gash, called Tur-a, (Arabic word for canal) and carries the waters from the stream to the lands cultivated with cotton (Ali Ghidir AgroIndustry), next/around to the village Ali Ghidir. The water supply is solved, thanks to a reservoir fed by a very old group of pumps (from the early 1930s) that draw water from the sands of the Gash. It is a huge deep basin, built on top on the small hill of granite, surrounded by old baobab trees. At the side of this large basin-tank, there was the Italian Civil Hospital, built in the 1920s, which for many years, has served the whole area near Tesseney, as far as the villages of Haikota, Gallug, Ali-Ghider, Talatahasher, Sabderat (villages bordering the Sudan), Sittimò, Aad Elit (village populated by about 1,000 individuals who speak a language all their own.