Travel to Marsa Alam

Twenty years ago, Marsa Alam was little more than a fishing village where the Eastern Desert touched the sea. The opening of its international airport in 2003 brought change, yet this stretch of Egyptian coastline remains remarkably wild—a place where 50 kilometers of pristine beaches give way to some of the healthiest coral reefs in the Red Sea. The statistics are staggering: over 450 species of coral, more than 1,200 species of fish, and roughly 17% of the marine life found nowhere else on Earth. Unlike Hurghada and Sharm el-Sheikh to the north, Marsa Alam’s reefs have largely escaped the overdevelopment that degraded those once-thriving systems.

What distinguishes Marsa Alam from Egypt’s more developed northern resorts is the sheer abundance of marine megafauna. Endangered dugongs—the “sea cows” that inspired mermaid legends—still graze the seagrass beds at Abu Dabbab, where roughly 30 individuals form one of the Red Sea’s last viable populations. Oceanic whitetip sharks cruise the blue waters around Elphinstone Reef 12 kilometers offshore, particularly from October through December when sightings become near-daily occurrences. At Sha’ab Samadai, a crescent-shaped reef known as Dolphin House, a resident pod of spinner dolphins rests and nurses in a lagoon now protected by strict UNESCO-backed regulations that limit daily visitor numbers.