El Gouna

El Gouna is one of the youngest towns in Egypt. The site was empty desert and salt flats between the Red Sea and the Eastern Desert mountains until the company Orascom Development, run by Samih Sawiris, began building a holiday town there, and the resort was founded in 1990. Rather than a single hotel strip, the plan cut channels into the flat shore so that seawater filled a series of lagoons, leaving islands linked by bridges, and set low sand-coloured buildings with domes, arches and wind towers along the water in a style borrowed loosely from Nubian and Mediterranean building.

The resort grew steadily through the 1990s and 2000s as hotels, marinas, a golf course and housing were added, and it became a town with its own schools, clinics, staff housing and, between 2012 and 2022, a satellite campus of the Technical University of Berlin. Abu Tig Marina opened as its yacht harbour and two more marinas followed; the resort has its own small airport, while almost all arrivals use Hurghada's airport instead.

Tourism on this coast has had hard years — the fall in visitors after the 2011 revolution, the loss of the Russian and later other charter markets, and the pandemic — and El Gouna, with a large share of privately owned second homes and long-stay residents, came through them better than the big package resorts. From 2017 the El Gouna Film Festival brought an international audience each autumn, and the town has since built a reputation for water sports, particularly kitesurfing, and for remote workers wintering on the Red Sea.

The town has no old culture of its own: everyone who lives here came from somewhere else. The permanent population is largely Egyptians from Cairo, the Delta and Upper Egypt who work in hotels, restaurants, construction and boats, alongside a settled foreign community of Germans, Russians, Italians, Britons and others who own or rent property, and a floating crowd of divers, kitesurfers and seasonal staff. English is used constantly, German and Russian are common, and Egyptian Arabic is the language of the back streets and staff quarters.

What passes for local tradition is built around the water and the wind. Diving and kitesurfing set the rhythm of the day for many residents, the marinas fill in the evening, and sporting events draw regular crowds. The El Gouna Film Festival, held each October since 2017, gives the town an annual week of screenings and industry talk that is unusual for a resort of this size, and the El Gouna International, a men's and women's squash tournament played here each April, reflects Egypt's strength in that sport.

Social rules are looser than anywhere else on the coast except the Sinai camps — alcohol is served openly, swimwear is normal by the water — but this is still Egypt, and the staff who serve visitors live by ordinary Egyptian norms. Visitors who dress reasonably away from the beach, greet people with as-salamu alaykum and tip small amounts often are treated accordingly.

El Gouna's resident population is small — a couple of thousand villas and apartments and the staff who serve them — with many times that number passing through in the high season. Nearly all work is tourism or property: hotels, restaurants, dive and kite centres, boat crews, gardeners and maintenance teams, estate agents and the building trade, plus the schools, clinic and services that keep a self-contained town running. Staff housing and a workers' district sit inland from the water, away from the visitors' side of town.

Life here is quieter and more ordered than in an Egyptian town of comparable size. There is little through traffic, the streets are swept, water and power are managed by the developer, and the whole place is designed to be crossed by bicycle or shuttle bus. Food shopping and banking are Downtown, and a short drive brings the bigger supermarkets, hospitals and markets of Hurghada.

The pressures are those of a manufactured town on a desert coast: everything depends on the visitor season and on flights from Europe, water has to be produced and treated, the lagoons need constant management to stay clean, and building has continued along the shore on both sides. Longer-stay foreign residents have grown in number since remote work became common, which has pushed up rents and changed the mix of people in the town outside the summer months.

Food in El Gouna is international before it is Egyptian: Italian, Levantine, Asian, seafood and grill menus fill the Downtown square and the marina quays, and most kitchens are aimed at visitors. Red Sea fish is the thing worth ordering — grouper, snapper, sea bream and calamari, grilled whole with lemon, cumin and garlic, or fried, with tahina, salads and warm flatbread alongside. Prawns cooked in tomato and chilli are a standard of the coast.

Egyptian staples are easy to find if sought out, mostly where the staff eat: koshari, the bowl of rice, macaroni, lentils, chickpeas, fried onions and spiced tomato sauce that is the national cheap meal; ful medames, slow-cooked fava beans eaten for breakfast with bread and oil; ta'meya, the Egyptian falafel made from fava beans rather than chickpeas; and shawarma and kofta from grills along the back streets. Fiteer, a layered pastry served sweet or savoury, turns up in the bakeries.

Drinking follows the resort's own rules. Egypt's own beer and wine are sold openly in the hotels and bars, which is not true of most towns on the mainland, and the cafés serve strong sweet tea, mint tea, Turkish-style coffee and fresh mango, guava and sugarcane juice. Karkadeh, chilled hibiscus, is the common non-alcoholic drink in the heat, and dates and syrup-soaked pastries such as basbousa and konafa appear wherever Egyptian sweets are sold.