Hurghada and its offshore islands

Hurghada was a fishing village of a few hundred people until oil was found nearby in the 1910s, and a resort town of a quarter of a million since the 1980s. It is the oldest diving base on the Egyptian Red Sea and the departure point for most of the northern wreck routes.

The day boats work a line of reefs and small islands a few miles offshore, sheltered behind the Giftun group: Umm Gamar, a bare rock with a plateau and a wall on its northern tip; Small Giftun; Gota Abu Ramada, shallow coral towers on white sand that everybody calls the Aquarium; and further north the horseshoe reef of Shaab el Erg, which has a resident pod of bottlenose dolphins and is where the Hurghada boats go when the weather shuts the offshore sites.

Local protection is unusual here in that it is largely private: HEPCA, the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association, was set up by dive operators in 1992 and it is HEPCA rather than the state that installed and maintains the mooring buoys that keep anchors off the reefs.