Ras Muhammad National Park

Egypt's first national park, declared in 1983, occupying the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula where the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba meet. It is widely rated among the finest dive and snorkel sites in the world, and the reason is geography: deep water comes close inshore and strong currents deliver a constant supply of food, so the reef walls are crowded.

The famous sites

• Shark Reef and Yolanda Reef — two coral pinnacles with sheer walls, big schooling fish and, at Yolanda, the scattered cargo of a wrecked freighter, most memorably a field of bathroom fittings on the sand
• The Shark Observatory — a cliff-top viewpoint over a vertical drop, good even without getting wet
• The mangroves — a narrow channel of salt-tolerant trees, among the most northerly mangrove stands anywhere
• Hidden Bay and the salt marsh, with an inland lake below sea level

Snorkellers get a great deal here: the reef tops are shallow and the drop-offs start close in. Currents can be strong — follow the guides' instructions about entry and exit points.

The park protects around 480 square kilometres, most of it water. Surveys have recorded well over a thousand fish species and some two hundred and twenty kinds of coral, roughly a tenth of which occur nowhere but the Red Sea.

Why the fish gather

The tip of Sinai sits where two deep gulfs meet, and the water moving between them concentrates plankton against the reef walls. That reliable food supply supports enormous seasonal aggregations — snapper, barracuda, batfish, jacks and unicornfish massing in numbers that surprise even experienced divers.

The same currents make it a route for larger animals: reef sharks, occasionally hammerheads in summer, turtles, and rays.

Protected early, and on purpose

In the early 1980s Sharm el-Sheikh was barely developed and the reefs to the south were already showing damage from spearfishing, anchoring and shell collecting. Declaring the area a national park was a deliberate decision to protect a stretch of coast before the resorts arrived rather than after.

Compared with reefs closer to the towns, it worked. Ras Muhammad has moorings instead of anchoring, limits on visitor numbers at some sites, and enforced no-take rules — and it remains in noticeably better condition than the coast around it.

The Yolanda

The freighter that gives Yolanda Reef its name ran aground in 1980 and later slid off the shelf into deep water during a storm. Her cargo stayed behind, strewn across the reef at snorkelling and diving depth: containers, a truck, and crates of sanitary ware. It is an absurd sight and it has become one of the most photographed things in the Red Sea.