Hurghada
— — the desert dropping into a long blue.
Not only on a wall.
“A long crescent of resort on the Red Sea, four hundred kilometres south of Suez and three hundred north of Marsa Alam. The town was a small fishing village until tourism arrived in the 1980s. Reefs offshore at Giftun and Abu Nuhas hold some of the world's most diverse coral. From the corniche, the dry pink mountains of the Eastern Desert sit against the blue.
Hurghada, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hurghada sits on the western shore of the Red Sea in Egypt's Red Sea Governorate, about 530 kilometres southeast of Cairo and 290 kilometres east of Luxor. It was founded as a small fishing settlement in the early twentieth century around oil exploration at Ras Gharib. Tourism took hold in the 1980s, and the city now stretches roughly 40 kilometres along the coast through three districts: Ad-Dahar, Sekalla, and El Memsha. The 2017 census placed the population near 248,000, and the city receives international flights direct into Hurghada International Airport.
The reef system offshore is the northern end of the Indo-Pacific coral province and one of the most species-rich diving regions in the world. Giftun Island and the surrounding Giftun Islands Marine Park, gazetted in 1995, hold more than 200 reef-building coral species and over 1,000 fish species. The Abu Nuhas shipwrecks, four cargo ships that grounded on the same reef between 1869 and 1981, sit between 6 and 27 metres down and are among the most dived wrecks on the Egyptian coast. Water temperature ranges from 22°C in February to 29°C in August.
The climate is hot desert, sheltered from the Sahara behind the Red Sea Hills. Average summer highs reach 36°C in July and August, with humidity tempered by the constant northerly wind that runs down the Red Sea trough. Winter days hold between 21 and 23°C, and the sea stays warm enough for swimming all year. Rainfall is effectively zero across the year. The same wind that cools the coast feeds the kite and windsurf schools at El Gouna and Soma Bay, which sit 25 kilometres north and 45 kilometres south of the city respectively.