Hurghada Old Town (El Dahar)

El Dahar is the original Hurghada — the part that existed before the resorts, on the inland side of the main road, and the place to go if you want to see how the town actually works.

It is not pretty in a postcard sense, and that is rather the point. Narrow streets, apartment blocks, workshops, a busy produce market, and prices set for people who live here rather than for people on holiday.

What to do

• The souq — spices, produce, household goods, and the fish market in the mornings
• Eat — koshary, ful, taameya and grilled fish at a fraction of marina prices
• Sit in an ahwa with tea or karkadeh and watch a game of dominoes
• The Coptic church and the old mosque, a few minutes apart

A note on shopping

Haggling is normal in the souq and the opening price for an obvious visitor will be high. Stay friendly, take your time, and be prepared to walk. Dress a little more conservatively here than on the beach strip — it is a residential district, not a resort.

Hurghada began around 1905 as a camp for oil prospectors on an empty stretch of Red Sea coast. El Dahar is where that settlement grew: a fishing and oil-working town of a few thousand people, cut off from the Nile valley by three hundred kilometres of desert and supplied largely by sea.

For most of the twentieth century that was all there was. Photographs from the 1970s show a low, dusty town of a few streets with nothing but shoreline to the south.

The split

When diving tourism arrived in the 1980s it did not expand the old town — it built a new one alongside. Sekalla and then the long resort strip grew southward along the coast, oriented entirely to the water, while El Dahar stayed where it was and kept doing what it had been doing.

The result is a town with two centres that barely resemble each other: one built for visitors and facing the sea, one built for residents and facing inward. Most people on a package holiday never cross between them, which is a shame — the ten-minute taxi ride is the difference between a resort and a place.

Still a working port

Fishing has not stopped. The catch that turns up in the market and in the seafood restaurants along the coast still comes in on local boats, and the fleet is a direct continuation of the settlement that was here before anyone had heard of the reefs.