Sharm El Sheikh

For most of its history the site was an anchorage rather than a town: a sheltered bay on an otherwise waterless stretch of coast, used by Bedouin of the Muzeina and by fishermen working the reefs. Its modern story is military. Egypt fortified the position to control shipping through the Strait of Tiran into the Gulf of Aqaba, and that control was one of the triggers of the 1967 war, after which Israel held the whole peninsula and began building the first small hotels and dive operations at what it called Ofira.

Egypt recovered Sharm El Sheikh under the 1979 peace treaty, with the withdrawal from Sinai completed in 1982, and set about turning it into a resort. Through the 1980s and 1990s Naama Bay filled with hotels, the airport was expanded, and international chains spread along the bays towards Nabq. Diving drove the growth: Ras Mohammed was protected as a national park in 1983, and the reefs at its tip and in the strait became some of the most visited in the world.

The town's later history has swung between prominence and crisis. It became a standing venue for international summits and Middle East peace talks, which gave it the nickname City of Peace, and hosted the COP27 climate conference in 2022. It was also struck by bombings in 2005, and the 2015 destruction of a Russian airliner shortly after take-off led to suspended flights that emptied the hotels for years. Each time, visitors have eventually returned to the reefs.

Sharm is not an old Egyptian town and does not behave like one. Almost everyone living here has come from somewhere else — from the Nile Valley and the Delta for hotel, construction and transport work, from Europe and Russia as dive instructors, guides and long-stay residents — and the local culture is the workplace culture of tourism, with Arabic, English and Russian all in daily use and signs in several alphabets.

Around and behind it are the Bedouin of South Sinai, whose tribal territories predate the resort by centuries. They run desert camps, guide treks and drive the jeeps on the quad and safari trips, and Bedouin tea brewed with wild herbs, served seated on cushions in a wool tent, is one of the few pieces of local tradition that visitors meet directly. Complaints that the tribes were left out of the tourist economy are long-standing.

Manners follow the resort rather than the country: swimwear on the beach, late dinners and open nightlife along the Naama Bay promenade. A short walk inland the norms are Egyptian again, with modest dress, the call to prayer from the Old Market mosque, and the rhythm of Ramadan, when the town's workers fast through hot days and the cafés fill after sunset. Diving gives the place a further culture of its own: early mornings, boat routines and reef etiquette that insists nothing is touched or taken.

Roughly 75,000 people live in Sharm El Sheikh, a number that rises and falls with the tourist season and with the fortunes of the airport. Almost all of them work directly or indirectly in tourism: hotels, restaurants, dive centres, boat crews, taxis, shops and the construction sites that keep extending the resort along the coast. Staff housing and the ordinary shops, bakeries and clinics are concentrated in Hadaba and the inland districts behind the Old Market, well away from the seafront that visitors see.

Everything here has to be brought in or made. Fresh water comes from desalination, food and building materials arrive by road from the Nile Valley, and power and waste are constant pressures on a settlement of this size in a desert. Water use, coastal building and the damage that anchors, sunscreen and careless divers do to the reefs are recurring local arguments, since the reefs are the town's entire livelihood.

The working day starts early, because dive boats and desert trips leave at dawn, and pauses in the heat of the afternoon before the promenades come alive in the evening. The town's exposure to outside shocks is its defining feature: after the 2015 air disaster, and again during the disruption to regional aviation that followed the war beginning in February 2026, hotels stood half empty and workers went home to their villages until flights returned.

Sharm's everyday cooking is Red Sea seafood. Grouper, snapper, sea bream, calamari and shrimp are grilled over charcoal or fried and served whole with tahina, baba ghanoush, rocket salad, pickles and flat baladi bread — the standard table of the Old Market fish restaurants, where the catch is usually picked from ice at the front. Sayadeya, fish baked or stewed with spiced rice, onions and tomato, is the local one-dish version.

Behind the beachfront the food is plain Egyptian, because that is what the workforce eats: koshari, the bowl of rice, macaroni, lentils, chickpeas, fried onions and spiced tomato sauce; ful medames, slow-cooked fava beans scooped up with bread at breakfast; ta'meya, the Egyptian falafel made from fava rather than chickpea; and grilled kofta, shawarma and roast chicken from street grills. Fiteer, a layered flaky pastry served sweet or savoury, is a common late-night order.

Bedouin cooking appears mostly on desert trips: bread baked on a domed metal sheet or buried in embers, goat or chicken cooked slowly over coals, rice, and strong sweet tea flavoured with sage or wild mint. Drinks elsewhere run from karkadeh, the tart hibiscus infusion drunk hot or iced, and fresh mango, guava and sugarcane juice, to the imported wines, spirits and Egyptian beer served in the hotels and along the promenade.