El Quseir

El Quseir owes its existence to the shortest road between the Nile and the Red Sea. From this shore, pharaonic expeditions sailed towards Punt for incense, ebony and gold, supplied along the desert track through Wadi Hammamat from Qift, and the route's rock inscriptions record centuries of quarrying and trading caravans. In the Ptolemaic and Roman periods the port of Myos Hormos, excavated a few kilometres north of today's town at Quseir al-Qadim, sent ships to India and Arabia and received pepper, textiles and spices for the journey inland to the Nile and on to Alexandria.

The medieval and Ottoman town grew as a pilgrim port. Egyptian and North African Muslims crossed the desert to sail from here to Jeddah on the Hajj, and grain from Upper Egypt was shipped to the holy cities of Arabia. An Ottoman fortress was built above the harbour in the late 16th century, on the recommendation of Sinan Pasha, to give the port security. In May 1799 a French column under General Belliard took the town during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, and the garrison held the fort against a siege by British naval forces before the French rebuilt and then abandoned it. In June 1801 an Anglo-Indian force from Bombay landed here and marched across the desert to Qena on the Nile to help expel the French.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 ended the town's role as a transit port, and El Quseir turned to phosphate, mined in the mineral-rich hills of the Red Sea Governorate and shipped from works on the shore. The deposits north of the town, found in 1912, were worked by an Italian company until it was expropriated after the 1952 revolution, and phosphate gave the town its living for much of the 20th century before it declined. Since the 1990s tourism has taken over along this coast, with dive hotels spreading north and south, while the fort became a museum of the town's long history and the old centre kept its low, weathered buildings.

El Quseir feels like an Egyptian provincial town that happens to sit on a famous coast. Life is quiet, conservative and Muslim, organised around the mosque, the family and the harbour, and visitors are treated with curiosity and courtesy rather than the persistent selling found at the big resorts. Most residents are Egyptians from the Nile Valley, many whose families arrived for the phosphate works or for government jobs.

The desert behind the town belongs to the Ababda, a people of the Eastern Desert whose territory stretches south towards the Sudanese border. They keep their own customs of hospitality and tribal law, work with camels and goats, guide desert trips and are known for jabana, the Beja coffee made from roasted beans and ginger and poured in small cups from a long-necked clay pot.

The town's older identity is tied to the Hajj. For centuries pilgrims gathered here before crossing to Arabia, and the port's mosques, tombs and street names still carry that memory. Diving has brought a small foreign presence, mostly German and Italian, which stays largely within the hotels along the coast. Dress in town is modest, greetings are unhurried and drawn out, and hospitality is offered as tea before anything else is discussed.

El Quseir is a town of about 50,000 people, small enough that most of its centre can be walked in an afternoon. Work is in tourism at the hotels and dive centres along the coast, in fishing, in the port, in government offices and in the shops and workshops of the old town; phosphate, once the town's mainstay, is still mined and shipped along this coast but employs far fewer people here than it did.

The day starts early, pauses through the worst of the afternoon heat, and comes back to life in the evening, when families walk on the corniche, men sit over tea and shisha in the cafés and children play in the streets behind the seafront. Friday prayers set the rhythm of the week, and Ramadan changes it entirely.

Isolation is the defining fact of daily life. Hurghada and Marsa Alam, each around two hours away, hold the airports, the hospitals and the larger shops, and the nearest big city inland is Qena or Luxor across the desert. Water and most food come in by road. Young people leave for Hurghada and Cairo for work and study, while the hotel strip along the coast continues to expand slowly, providing jobs without much changing the town itself.

The sea sets the menu. Red Sea fish — grouper, snapper, sea bream, parrotfish and mackerel — are grilled whole over charcoal or fried, seasoned with cumin, garlic and lemon, and served with rice, tahina, baladi bread and small salads. Sayadeya, fish baked or served on rice cooked with fried onion, tomato and spices, is the dish of the Egyptian coasts, and prawns and calamari appear on the corniche menus when the boats have had a good day.

Everything else is standard Egyptian cooking, done well and cheaply. Ful medames, slow-cooked fava beans with oil, cumin and lemon, is breakfast; ta'meya, the Egyptian falafel made from fava beans, is fried to order and stuffed into bread with salad and tahina; koshari mixes rice, macaroni, lentils, chickpeas, fried onions and a spiced tomato sauce. Kofta, chicken and liver come off the grills in the evening, and fiteer, a layered pastry eaten sweet or savoury, is a bakery staple.

Drinks are tea, strong and heavily sugared, mint tea, and thick coffee; in the Eastern Desert, jabana coffee spiced with ginger is the Ababda tradition. Karkadeh, chilled hibiscus, and fresh mango, guava and sugarcane juice are sold from stands, and dates and syrup-soaked sweets such as basbousa and konafa are the usual end to a meal. Alcohol is confined to the coastal hotels.