Saint Catherine

The valley's history begins with hermits. From the third century Christian ascetics settled in the Sinai mountains, drawn by the peak above, identified with the mountain where Moses received the law, and by a bush venerated as the Burning Bush of Exodus. A chapel was built here in the fourth century under the empress Helena, and in the sixth the emperor Justinian enclosed the site with the high granite walls that still stand.

The monastery survived every change of power in the region. It came to hold the relics of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, which gave it its present name and drew Latin and Orthodox pilgrims alike, and it kept its independence under Muslim rule, tradition holding that Muhammad himself granted it protection. A mosque stands inside the walls. Its isolation preserved an extraordinary library and collection of icons, including works that escaped the Byzantine destruction of images; among its manuscripts was the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus, removed in the nineteenth century.

The town outside grew much later. Through the twentieth century it was a scattering of Jebeliya Bedouin gardens and houses; the Israeli occupation of Sinai from 1967 until the withdrawal completed in 1982 brought the first roads and visitors, and after Egypt's return the road from Sharm El Sheikh, the settlement at Al-Milga and a tourism economy took shape. The mountains were made a protected area in 1988 and the monastery and its surroundings inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002. In May 2025 an Egyptian appeal court ruled on the ownership of the land beneath the monastery, a case connected with the state's Great Transfiguration development project.

The town's population is overwhelmingly Jebeliya Bedouin, a tribe whose name comes from the Arabic for mountain and whose traditional role is bound up with the monastery: by long tradition their ancestors were settled here to serve it, and families have worked its gardens, guarded its gates and guided its visitors for centuries. They are Muslim, speak their own dialect of Arabic, and hold an unusually close relationship with a Christian community — an arrangement that has outlasted every ruler of Sinai.

Their mountain culture is distinct from that of the Bedouin on the coast. Families keep walled orchard gardens in the high wadis, with apples, apricots, almonds, figs and olives grown behind stone walls and watered from wells, and move between the town and these gardens through the year. Knowledge of the paths, of water sources and of medicinal plants underpins the trekking economy, and guiding in the protected area is largely in local Bedouin hands, which gives the community a stake in it.

On the other side of the monastery walls is a Greek Orthodox community that has kept the liturgy going here for some fifteen centuries, with services at night and a calendar that visitors rarely see. Between the two, the town's manners are conservative and quiet: modest dress, no drinking, early nights, and a hospitality that begins with tea. The other rhythm is the arrival of buses before midnight and their departure a few hours after dawn.

Only a few thousand people live in Saint Catherine, most of them in Al-Milga, and the town is one of the highest and coldest in Egypt. Nearly everyone depends on visitors: guiding treks and camel trips, driving pick-ups, running camps and guesthouses, cooking, and selling water, bread and blankets to climbers. Orchard gardening, goat herding and remittances from relatives working on the coast fill the gaps, and a share of families still spend part of the year in the mountains rather than the town.

Life is shaped by altitude and isolation. Nights are cold for much of the year and heating is expensive; water comes from wells and tankers; supplies arrive by road from the coast, so prices are higher than at sea level; and medical care beyond a small clinic means a two-hour drive. Employment is seasonal and thin, and the town empties whenever tourism to Sinai falters, as it has repeatedly over the past two decades and again with the disruption to regional travel that followed the war beginning in February 2026.

The daily rhythm is unusual. Afternoons are quiet, the shops in Al-Milga stir in the evening, and the town's busiest hours are between midnight and sunrise, when guides, drivers and tea sellers work the mountain while everyone else sleeps. Conservation rules in the protected area, grazing and water rights, and how much of the tourist income reaches Bedouin families rather than coastal operators are the recurring local arguments.

Food here is simple and shaped by what can be carried up from the coast or grown in the wadis. The Jebeliya bake bread on a domed metal sheet or bury the dough in hot sand and embers, and the standard meal at a camp is goat or chicken cooked slowly over coals with rice, lentils and whatever vegetables are to hand, eaten seated on rugs from shared dishes.

The gardens supply the town's own produce: apples, apricots, almonds, figs, pomegranates and olives, dried or preserved for the winter, and herbs gathered from the mountains — sage, wild mint and thyme — which flavour the tea. Tea is constant, brewed strong and very sweet over a fire, and is the first thing offered to a guest and the thing most climbers remember, bought from a stall on the path in the cold before dawn.

In Al-Milga the food is ordinary Egyptian and cheap: ful medames, slow-cooked fava beans eaten with bread at breakfast; ta'meya, the fava-bean falafel; koshari, the bowl of rice, macaroni, lentils, chickpeas, fried onions and spiced tomato sauce; grilled chicken, and rice with vegetables. Alcohol has no place in the town, and drinks are tea, coffee and juice.