Hurghada

Hurghada began early in the twentieth century as a small settlement where fishing families and Bedouin used a sheltered anchorage, and it grew first on oil rather than tourism: the fields discovered in the Gulf of Suez in the 1910s made it a company town of rigs, pipelines and workers' housing, with El Dahar as its inland centre. It remained obscure, hot and remote, several hundred kilometres from the Nile Valley across empty desert.

Diving changed it. The Red Sea reefs off the town drew scientific interest and then foreign divers, and the sheltered islands offshore gave boats an easy cruising ground. From the 1980s the Egyptian government promoted the coast for mass tourism, and international investment built hotels at an extraordinary pace: Hurghada spread south from El Dahar along the shore in a continuous line of resorts, with new bays such as Sahl Hasheesh and Makadi Bay developed from nothing, and El Gouna laid out on the lagoons to the north.

The city's population multiplied many times over within a generation, drawing workers from the Nile Valley and the Delta and residents from Europe and Russia. Growth has come with costs, and reef damage, unregulated building and water supply have all been long-running concerns. Like the rest of the coast, Hurghada has been shaken repeatedly by outside events — the aftermath of the 2015 air disaster on the Sinai side, the pandemic, and the regional disruption to aviation since the war that began in February 2026 — and each time has rebuilt its visitor numbers.

Hurghada has two cultures side by side. El Dahar is an Egyptian provincial town: families from Upper Egypt and the Delta, coffee houses full of men watching football, a weekly rhythm built around Friday prayers, and shopping in the bazaar. The seafront south of it is an international resort where Russian, German, Polish, Czech and English are heard as often as Arabic, menus are translated four ways, and the norms are those of a holiday rather than a country.

The original inhabitants of this coast are Bedouin of the Eastern Desert, and further south the Ababda, whose camps, camel herding and desert knowledge now support safari and trekking trips. Bedouin hospitality — tea brewed strong and sweet with wild herbs, bread baked on a domed metal sheet, guests seated on cushions — is the tradition most visitors encounter, though the tribes remain on the margins of the tourist economy.

Diving gives the city a further identity of its own: instructors and boat crews from a dozen countries, early-morning departures, and an etiquette that insists nothing on the reef is touched, fed or taken. Around them a long-established community of foreign residents has settled, running dive centres, restaurants and watersports schools, and giving Hurghada a more permanent international character than most Egyptian towns of its size.

Hurghada is the largest city of the Red Sea Governorate, whose population passed 400,000 in the early 2020s, and the great majority of its residents arrived within the past few decades from elsewhere in Egypt. Tourism employs most of them directly or indirectly — hotels, restaurants, dive centres, boat crews, taxis, shops and the constant construction that pushes the city further along the coast — while fishing, the Gulf of Suez oil industry and the port provide the rest. Residents live mainly in El Dahar and the inland districts behind the resorts, where the schools, clinics, markets and workshops are.

Everything the city consumes is imported across the desert or made on site: fresh water comes from desalination, vegetables and building materials arrive by road from the Nile Valley, and power and waste treatment struggle to keep pace with growth. The reefs that pay for it all are under pressure from anchors, sewage, landfill for new beaches and sheer numbers of swimmers, and marine protection rules on the islands are tightened periodically in response.

The working day begins before dawn for boat crews and runs late for restaurant and hotel staff, with a long pause through the hottest hours. Seasons matter more than months: the city fills with European visitors in winter and with Egyptian families in summer, and empties whenever flights are disrupted, as they were after the regional disruption to aviation that followed the war beginning in February 2026.

Seafood is the city's own cooking. Grouper, snapper, sea bream, calamari and shrimp, bought from the harbour and grilled over charcoal or fried, come with tahina, baba ghanoush, rocket, pickles and flat baladi bread; sayadeya, fish baked with spiced rice, onions and tomato, is the local one-dish version, and fish soup flavoured with cumin and tomato is common in the old quarter.

Away from the seafront the food is standard Egyptian and cheap: koshari, the bowl of rice, macaroni, lentils, chickpeas, fried onions and spiced tomato sauce; ful medames, slow-cooked fava beans eaten at breakfast with bread; ta'meya, the Egyptian falafel made from fava beans rather than chickpeas; grilled kofta, shawarma and roast chicken; and fiteer, a layered flaky pastry served sweet or savoury. Sweets run to basbousa, konafa and syrup-soaked pastries, sold by weight in El Dahar's bakeries.

Drinks are tea, heavily sugared and often flavoured with mint, and thick coffee with cardamom, with karkadeh, the tart hibiscus infusion, drunk hot in winter and iced in summer, and fresh mango, guava and sugarcane juice from street stalls. Hotels and licensed restaurants serve Egyptian beer, local wine from the Mediterranean coast and imported spirits, and the bars along the marina stay open late.