Farafra Oasis

The smallest and quietest of the Western Desert oases, roughly halfway between Bahariya and Dakhla, and for most travellers a base for the White Desert rather than a destination in itself. The town, Qasr el-Farafra, is small enough to walk across in twenty minutes.

What is here

• Badr's Museum — a mudbrick building made by a local artist, filled with his own sculpture and painting of oasis life. Idiosyncratic, entirely handmade, and the best thing in town
• Bir Sitta and other hot springs, good at night
• Palm and olive groves, and a small old quarter of mudbrick houses
• The White Desert, forty-five minutes north

There is very little tourist infrastructure, which is either the drawback or the appeal depending on what you came for.

Farafra was known to the ancient Egyptians as Ta-iht, "the land of the cow", and it appears in New Kingdom records as one of the oases under Egyptian control. It was never populous. The scale of the settlement has always been limited by the water available, and Farafra had less than its neighbours.

For most of its history it was a stopping point rather than a place people came to — a day's rest on the route between Bahariya and Dakhla, with springs and shade.

Isolation as a norm

Until asphalt roads reached the oases in the second half of the twentieth century, Farafra was among the most cut-off inhabited places in Egypt. Travellers' accounts from the nineteenth century describe a settlement of a few hundred people, with a single mudbrick fort where everyone sheltered when raiders appeared.

That fort is largely gone, but the pattern it implies — a very small community, a long way from anywhere, entirely dependent on a spring — describes Farafra for most of its existence.

Badr

The museum is worth explaining. Badr Abdel Moghny is a Farafra-born artist who began painting and sculpting oasis life as a boy and built, over decades, a mudbrick gallery to hold the work — figures, reliefs and scenes of harvest, weddings and desert. It is a genuinely personal museum in a place with almost no institutions, and it has become the reason a number of visitors stop in Farafra at all rather than driving straight through to the dunes.