Red Sea Governorate, Egypt — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Red Sea Governorate known for?

Hurghada, the capital, grew from a fishing village into the coast's diving hub, and the patch reefs around the Giftun Islands are what most visitors come to see. South of it, Marsa Alam and El Quseir pull divers toward quieter water and the dugongs and dolphins of the far reefs. Inland the story flips entirely: the Eastern Desert holds the oilfields around Ras Gharib and gold worked since pharaonic times, so the governorate lives off both the sea and the rock behind it.

Where is Red Sea Governorate?

Red Sea Governorate is a long strip down Egypt's eastern flank, pinned between the Nile valley and the sea it is named for. It is enormous. By area it takes in roughly a fifth of the whole country, most of that empty Eastern Desert rather than coast.

The governorate runs from the Suez Governorate in the north down to the border with Sudan, and its western edge presses against a whole row of Nile-valley governorates including Aswan, Qena and Asyut. The shape of the land is simple to read. A wall of bare mountains, the Red Sea Hills, runs parallel to the shore and separates the desert interior from the narrow coastal plain where every town sits.

West of that ridge the ground drops away toward the Nile. Rain almost never reaches the interior, so the wadis stay dry for years at a stretch. The coast itself is a thin ribbon of resort towns, and Hurghada holds down its northern half while Safaga, El Quseir and Marsa Alam string out to the south.

Everything human clings to that seam between the hills and the water.

What is Red Sea Governorate like?

Two cultures share this coast and barely overlap. On the shore, the towns are young and built for outsiders, so daily life turns on boats, dive centres and the resorts of Hurghada; Arabic is the common tongue, and much of the working population arrived from the Nile valley within living memory. It is a place people came to, not a place people are from.

The older culture is inland. The Ababda, an Arabized branch of the Beja, have herded camels and goats through the wadis of the Eastern Desert for centuries, trading charcoal and gathering medicinal plants across the Red Sea Hills. Their range once ran from the Nile out to this coast.

Some of their families run desert camps and guide visitors around Marsa Alam, so the two worlds meet at the reef's edge. The nomad heritage stays quietly intact inland even as the shore rebuilds itself every decade.

What is the history of Red Sea Governorate?

This coast is old. Old Kingdom pharaohs sent expeditions into the Eastern Desert for gold as early as the third millennium BC, and El Quseir, at the shortest crossing between the Nile and the sea, served as a harbour for Queen Hatshepsut's famed voyage to the land of Punt. Rome later ran a port there for the trade in spices and incense off the Indian Ocean.

In the Islamic centuries the same El Quseir carried pilgrims toward Mecca. Hurghada, by contrast, is barely a hundred years old, a fishing settlement until oil and then diving remade it.

What is the climate of Red Sea Governorate?

It is hot desert. Rain here is close to a rumour, and Hurghada counts something like 320 clear days a year while whole seasons pass on the coast without a drop. Summers from May into October are fierce, with inland desert heat pushed toward the shore, while winters stay warm and dry, the sea holding enough heat to swim through.

A steady breeze off the Red Sea takes the edge off the worst of it and keeps the humidity low, which is why the coast draws sailors and kite surfers as readily as divers.

How do you get to Red Sea Governorate?

Most people fly straight in. Hurghada's airport takes charter and scheduled flights from across Europe, dropping visitors within reach of the resorts without ever crossing the desert. Marsa Alam has its own airport for the southern reefs.

The overland route is the other option, a long desert road east from Cairo and the Nile valley over the Red Sea Hills to the coast. Once you are on the shore a single coastal highway threads the towns together, from Ras Gharib in the north down through Hurghada, Safaga and El Quseir toward Marsa Alam.