Your weekly Red Sea briefing. Every Thursday.
Get free weekly updates →Eight towns that are genuinely different from one another, twelve months that are not interchangeable, the dive sites and the day trips with the parts the brochures leave out. Written by the desk, checked and dated. What we recommend is never decided by who pays us.
El Gouna
A purpose-built lagoon town 25km north of Hurghada — the coast’s most polished address, and the least Egyptian-feeling place on it.
Hurghada
The coast’s real city — biggest, cheapest, busiest, and the one place here that exists for reasons other than tourism.
Sahl Hasheesh
A quiet crescent bay 20km south of Hurghada, built for calm — with the trade-offs calm brings.
Makadi
A hotel bay 30km south of Hurghada built around families, water parks and a very good house reef.
Soma Bay
A private peninsula 45km south of Hurghada — golf, deep water, serious kitesurfing, and almost nobody else.
Safaga
A working port town 53km south of Hurghada — phosphate ships, world-class wind, and prices that have not been rewritten for tourists.
El Quseir
A genuinely old port town 140km south of Hurghada — an Ottoman fort, a working harbour, and the closest thing this coast has to history you can walk through.
Marsa Alam
The far south — the coast’s best diving, its clearest water, its longest transfers, and dugongs in a bay you can swim to.
Hurghada's museum runs from prehistory to the age of Muhammad Ali along 11 corridors — nine of them for ancient Egypt — with statues of Queen Meritamun, three royal objects of Thutmose III, a collection of Islamic lustre pottery and cases showing bedouin tent furniture beside a howdah.
16 October 2026
The governorate's undersecretary for education has set up a joint committee to go through every administrative and technical side of Al-Gawhara Official Distinguished Language School, after an unannounced visit recorded poor administrative discipline and marked lateness in pupils' arrival. The school discipline code is to be applied and legal steps taken over anything the inspection proves.
16 October 2026
Hotels and restaurants in El Gouna are fully booked during the film festival, the town's chief executive, Mohamed Amer, told Dar Al-Maaref. He put El Gouna's capacity at 3,000 hotel rooms, with a plan to reach 4,000, and said the tourism effect reaches Hurghada as well.
15 October 2026
Red Sea Governor Walid Al-Barqi has withdrawn the land of the second phase of Hurghada's Craftsmen City from the Endowments Authority, after years of disagreement over workshop prices and how units are allocated. The governorate is now studying carrying out the work itself. No completion date has been given.
15 October 2026
Marsa Alam International received 26 international flights from European airports over the course of Thursday, Tourism Daily News reports. No airlines, routes, passenger numbers or occupancy figures were given.
15 October 2026
Marsa Alam city has given four occupancy-legalisation contracts to residents of Sheikh El-Shazly village, and says it is continuing to work through tenure files for applicants who meet the legal conditions.
15 October 2026
Marsa Alam residents can put complaints and requests directly to the head of the city every Wednesday at the local unit headquarters, the city council says.
15 October 2026
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Red Sea Governor Walid Al-Barqi has withdrawn the land of the second phase of Hurghada's Craftsmen City from the Endowments Authority, after years of disagreement over workshop prices and how units are allocated. The governorate is now studying carrying out the work itself. No completion date has been given.
15 October 2026
Kadmar Shipping Group says it is targeting mid-2027 to start operating the first phase of a logistics centre in Safaga, with bonded warehouses, a container yard and a lorry weighbridge alongside the new port.
15 October 2026
An official letter signed on Wednesday moves custodianship of about 1.6 square kilometres of unused land inside Egyptian Resorts Company's Sahl Hasheesh project, south of Hurghada, to the state's Mostaqbal Misr development authority.
14 October 2026
The video of a Hurghada girls' school choir that spread across Egyptian social media this week was recorded during the last school year, not this month, music teacher Rasha Fouad told Masrawy — and she says she was surprised to see it resurface.
6 October 2026
A video of pupils at Hurghada Secondary School for Girls performing the patriotic song «Aash Elli Qal» for the October War anniversary has spread widely online, and social media users are calling on the Minister of Education to honour the music teacher who led them.
5 October 2026
Egypt's Ministry of Social Solidarity has trained 100 nursery facilitators from Ras Ghareb down to Halayeb in the Japanese "learning through play" model, with a strand on spotting disability early. The reports do not say which nurseries took part.
4 October 2026
The Red Sea conservation group HEPCA has recorded a pod of Pseudorca crassidens at a dive site off Hurghada, a species rarely seen in these waters. Despite the name, specialists say it is a dolphin and no usual threat to humans.
13 October 2026
Divers and boat crews spotted the whale near Hurghada on Sunday. Scientists quoted by Al-Masry Al-Youm say it could become a new draw for visitors — and that its movements are being tracked in case of illegal fishing.
12 October 2026
Marking World Migratory Bird Day, the Red Sea protected areas asked divers, tourists, researchers and marine-tourism workers to photograph birds inside the reserves and log where and when they saw them. No email address, app or phone number for sending sightings in was published.
10 October 2026
Mona Zaki is to receive the Career Achievement Award at the El Gouna Film Festival's opening ceremony on 15 October, as the ninth edition runs in El Gouna until 23 October.
15 October 2026
El Gouna's film festival returns for a ninth edition running Thursday 15 October to 23 October, with British director Joanna Hogg presiding over the jury and giving a masterclass called "Life Into Film". The reporting so far gives no screening programme, venues or ticket details.
14 October 2026
The ninth El Gouna Film Festival takes place from 15 to 23 October with more than 80 narrative, documentary and short films, and the Egyptian actress Mona Zaki receiving a Career Achievement Award. Venues, ticket prices and a day-by-day schedule have not been published.
6 October 2026
Cheap sun and easy payment plans meet thin resale markets and shifting rules. How to buy on the Red Sea coast with your eyes open.
24 February 2026
A rough map of Hurghada's rental districts, what the money follows, and the habits that keep newcomers from paying for a flat they have never stood inside.
13 January 2026
Daylight saving ends in Egypt at the end of the last Thursday in October — 29 October this year — when clocks go back 60 minutes under Law No. 24 of 2023.
3 October 2026
Air Cairo is to link Graz, in the Austrian province of Styria, with Hurghada on a new summer service, aviation trade outlet Aviation.Direct reports. No start date, frequency or fares have been published.
2 October 2026
The head of the Egyptian Airports Company went through Hurghada's transit hall and passenger routes with Air Cairo's chairman, ahead of the airline running connecting flights through the airport. No start date or routes were given.
26 September 2026