Travel and Tourism in Egypt

Outdoor Activities and Adventure

Egypt's varied geography -- desert, mountains, river, and two seas -- makes it a destination of greater outdoor activity potential than its reputation as a monuments-and-beaches destination might suggest. The Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba offer world-class diving and snorkeling, as described in earlier sections, but the marine environment also supports kite-surfing, windsurfing, kayaking, and glass-bottom boat tours for those who prefer to stay on the surface. Soma Bay, a headland near Hurghada, is considered one of the best kite-surfing destinations in the world, with reliable wind patterns and purpose-built infrastructure for the sport. El Gouna's lagoons provide flat water ideal for windsurfing beginners and intermediates. The Dahab area on the Sinai's Gulf of Aqaba coast is the Sinai's windsurfing capital, with strong winds funneled through the Gulf creating conditions that attract dedicated windsurfers from Europe year after year.

Desert adventure is another major category, ranging from the accessible to the genuinely remote. The Western Desert oases route, connecting Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla, and Kharga in a loop accessible by paved road, can be navigated by independent travelers with a hired driver, while deeper desert exploration requires guided 4WD expeditions with experienced desert operators who carry the GPS equipment, extra fuel, food, and water that responsible desert travel demands. Camel trekking, operating from Siwa and several Sinai locations, offers a slower and more traditional mode of desert travel that rewards patience with an intimacy of experience unavailable from any vehicle. Multi-day camel journeys in the Sinai interior, traveling between Bedouin encampments and visiting remote springs and mountain sanctuaries, are available through specialized operators and represent one of the most authentic adventure travel experiences in the region.

Rock climbing has developed in the Sinai, where the granite mountains around Saint Catherine's offer routes of varying difficulty for technical climbers, with the added attraction of extraordinary landscapes and the possibility of combining climbing with visits to the monastery and mountain pilgrimage routes. Hiking in the Sinai's high mountain region, guided by local Bedouin who know the paths intimately, follows trails connecting remote hermitages, ancient gardens, and mountain springs in a landscape of austere beauty that recalls the terrain of the Old Testament narratives. The Nile itself offers kayaking and rowing, particularly in the Upper Egypt stretch between Luxor and Aswan where the river is calm and the scenery of palm-fringed banks, felucca sails, and desert cliffs provides constant visual reward. Hot air balloon flights over Luxor's west bank, already mentioned in the Luxor section, are the most popular adventure activity in Egypt for general tourists and operate daily at dawn throughout the tourist season.

Seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Egypt's seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites represent some of the most significant cultural and natural heritage on earth, spanning five millennia of human achievement and one of the most important natural paleontological records anywhere in the world.

Memphis and its Necropolis -- the Pyramid Fields from Giza to Dahshur was inscribed in 1979 as a Cultural World Heritage Site and encompasses the most famous ancient monuments in the world. The site includes the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, the last surviving of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, along with the pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure, the Great Sphinx, the Solar Boat Museum, and the associated causeways, valley temples, and mastaba tomb fields that constitute the complete funerary landscape of the Old Kingdom pharaohs. Beyond Giza, the Saqqara plateau preserves the Step Pyramid complex of Djoser, the earliest large stone building in human history, along with dozens of later pyramids and an extensive necropolis of mastaba tombs belonging to the officials of the Old Kingdom court. The Dahshur pyramids include the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid of Sneferu, representing the crucial transitional experiments between the stepped and true smooth-sided pyramid forms. Memphis itself, the ancient capital of the Old Kingdom, now survives primarily in fragmentary ruins in the agricultural plain near modern Mit Rahina, including a colossal recumbent statue of Ramesses II. The entire site constitutes an irreplaceable record of the origins of state-organized civilization and monumental construction.

Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis was inscribed in 1979 as a Cultural World Heritage Site and encompasses the spectacular concentration of temples, tombs, and monuments on both banks of the Nile at modern Luxor. On the east bank stand the Temple of Karnak and the Temple of Luxor, the greatest surviving examples of New Kingdom religious architecture, representing the accumulated building ambitions of pharaohs spanning nearly 1,500 years. On the west bank lies the full extent of the Theban Necropolis: the Valley of the Kings with its 63 royal tombs, the Valley of the Queens with the extraordinary painted tomb of Nefertari, the mortuary temples of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari and Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, the Colossi of Memnon, the Tombs of the Nobles, and the artisans' village of Deir el-Medina. The density, quality, and historical depth of the monuments within this site is unmatched anywhere on earth, representing perhaps the most concentrated accumulation of ancient artistic achievement in human history.

The Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae was inscribed in 1979 as a Cultural World Heritage Site, recognizing both the extraordinary quality of the monuments themselves and the unprecedented international effort to save them from the waters of Lake Nasser following the construction of the Aswan High Dam. The site encompasses the twin temples of Ramesses II and Nefertari at Abu Simbel, the Temple of Isis at Philae, the Temple of Kalabsha, and numerous other temples, fortresses, and rock inscriptions that were relocated during the 1960s rescue operation. The Abu Simbel temples, with their four colossal facade statues and their precisely calculated solar alignment, represent the apogee of New Kingdom imperialism and royal self-glorification in stone. The international effort to save them, organized by UNESCO and involving the contributions of over 50 countries, established the principle of collective responsibility for world cultural heritage that underlies the entire World Heritage convention.

Islamic Cairo was inscribed in 1979 as a Cultural World Heritage Site, recognizing the historic walled city as one of the world's most important concentrations of medieval Islamic architecture. The site encompasses over 600 listed monuments spanning Fatimid to Ottoman periods, including mosques, madrasas, hammams, caravanserais, fountains, and residential buildings that together constitute one of the finest medieval urban environments anywhere in the world. Key monuments include the Ibn Tulun Mosque (876-879 CE), the oldest intact mosque in Cairo and one of the finest examples of early Abbasid architecture outside Iraq; the great Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Hassan, completed in 1363 and considered the masterpiece of Mamluk religious architecture; the Citadel of Saladin; and the khan and bazaar complex of Khan el-Khalili. The historic street pattern, the traditional urban morphology of the medieval city, and the continuing daily life of its residents and merchants make Islamic Cairo a living rather than merely preserved heritage site.

Abu Mena was inscribed in 1979 as a Cultural World Heritage Site, recognizing the early Christian city built over the tomb of Saint Menas, a Roman soldier martyred under the Emperor Diocletian around 296 CE. Menas was reportedly a native Egyptian soldier who refused to renounce Christianity when his unit was ordered to participate in persecution of Christians. After his execution in the Western Desert near Alexandria, his remains were said to have been carried by a camel that refused to move when it reached a certain spot in the desert, which was taken as a sign that he should be buried there. A cult of Saint Menas developed rapidly, and by the fourth century CE a major pilgrimage complex had been built over his tomb, including three successive churches, a baptistery, thermal baths, and extensive hostel facilities for the pilgrims who came from across the Byzantine Empire to be healed by water blessed at the saint's tomb. The ampullae -- small flasks filled with water or oil blessed at Saint Menas's tomb -- were produced in enormous quantities and distributed across the Christian world; examples have been found as far away as Britain and Ethiopia. Abu Mena is currently inscribed on UNESCO's List of World Heritage in Danger due to rising groundwater levels caused by the introduction of irrigation agriculture in the surrounding area, which has destabilized the site's ancient foundations.

The Saint Catherine Area was inscribed in 2002 as a Cultural World Heritage Site, encompassing Saint Catherine's Monastery and the dramatic mountain landscape of the southern Sinai. The monastery, founded by the Emperor Justinian between 548 and 565 CE on the site of an earlier chapel commissioned by Helena, mother of Constantine, is the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world. It is built on the site traditionally identified as the burning bush -- the acacia shrub in the monastery's garden is venerated by believers as the actual bush, or a living descendant of it -- and within sight of the summit of Gebel Musa, traditionally identified as the biblical Mount Sinai. The monastery's collection of early Christian manuscripts, second in importance only to the Vatican's holdings, includes the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest and most complete manuscripts of the Christian Bible. The monastery's icon collection, spanning from the sixth century to the present, is one of the world's two oldest and most important, representing the full history of Byzantine and post-Byzantine iconography. The surrounding mountain landscape, with its dramatic granite peaks, ancient stone stairways, and scattered hermitages, contributes a spiritual dimension to the inscription that acknowledges the relationship between the physical environment and the religious significance it has held for millennia.

Wadi Al-Hitan, or Whale Valley, was inscribed in 2005 as a Natural World Heritage Site, the only natural heritage designation among Egypt's seven sites. Located in the Western Desert approximately 150 kilometers southwest of Cairo in the Fayum region, Wadi Al-Hitan contains the most important concentration of archaeocete whale fossils in the world -- the fossilized remains of the earliest fully ocean-going whales that still retained vestigial hind legs, representing one of the most important evolutionary transitions in the history of life on earth. The fossils, dated to between 37 and 40 million years ago, belong primarily to two genera: Basilosaurus, which reached lengths of 18 meters and is among the largest animals that ever lived, and Dorudon, a smaller species. The fossils are preserved in situ in the desert floor, eroding naturally from the rock in a sequence that allows the full anatomy of these transitional creatures to be studied. UNESCO described Wadi Al-Hitan as providing "an exceptional record of the history of life" and noted that it represents the most striking known evidence of the transition of whales from land to sea mammals. An outdoor museum with elevated walkways allows visitors to observe the fossils without damaging them, and the surrounding White Desert landscape adds scenic value to the scientific significance.