Dennis Bakhuis

Dive site · sea · Hurghada and its offshore islands

🇪🇬 Small Giftun

Hurghada, Red Sea, Egypt

The smaller of the two Giftun islands off Hurghada, and the shelter behind which most of the town's day-boat diving happens.

Dives here
1
Deepest
30.7 m
Water
salt
First · last
2017

Revision 1 · changed 10 Oct 2026

History
  1. r1 10 Oct 2026 Imported from the personal log · Dennis Bakhuis

Site data © divelog-sites contributors (ODbL), descriptions and maps CC BY-SA 4.0 · 53edcaf

1 map

Fringing reefShelf and plateau 15-25 mSmall GiftunWall, 100 m+Plateau edgeDrift south along the wall · 640 mMooringsNE corner of the plateauCurrentN50 m
  • Buoy
  • Hazard
  • Point of interest
  • Shoreline
  • Dive path
  • Wall / drop-off
  • Shallows
  • Coral / reef
  • Depth
Site map · 1 object · 1 path · max 20 m

The south-eastern corner of Small Giftun (Giftun Seghir): the fringing reef, the plateau at 15-25 m where the day boats moor, the shelf running north from its north-east corner along the vertical east wall (past 100 m), and the usual drift south along the wall onto the plateau. The zones and drift come from dive-centre descriptions (redseacreatures.com), so extents are approximate. Erg Somaya is left off. The origin is on the mooring area; the site's stored coordinates are the island's centre, about 1.5 km north-west.

Map © divelog-sites contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0 · 53edcaf

The Giftun islands lie a few miles off Hurghada and are the reason the town could become a diving resort at all: they break the prevailing northerly, and the strip of water behind them is diveable almost every day of the year.

Small Giftun (Giftun Seghir) has a fringing reef with drop-offs on its exposed side and easy coral gardens in its lee. It is not a spectacular site by Red Sea standards; it is a dependable one, which is a different and in practice more useful quality.

The Giftun islands are inside the Giftun–Ras Muhammad protected area and carry a per-person park fee.

Dived here with

Rene

Nearby sites

1 dive at Small Giftun

  1. 18 Oct 2017 with Rene boat date18 Oct 2017 depth30.7 m time70 min water—

Sources

  • First-hand observation (Dennis Bakhuis)