Wadi El Rayan

A protected area in the desert south-west of the Fayoum, built around two large lakes joined by a short drop of falling water — Egypt's only waterfalls. They are modest in height and entirely man-made in origin, but the setting is genuinely lovely: open desert, reeds, and a great deal of birdlife.

What is here

• The waterfalls, with cafés and viewpoints on both banks
• The upper and lower lakes, good for birds and quiet walking
• Gebel Mudawara, a flat-topped hill with a wide view over the whole basin — the best spot at sunset
• The Magic Lake and freshwater springs further into the reserve
• Wadi Al-Hitan, the fossil whale valley, lies within the wider protectorate

It is an easy day from Cairo and a natural pairing with Tunis Village and Lake Qarun.

The lakes are barely fifty years old. In the 1970s, agricultural drainage from the Fayoum — water that had already been used on the fields and had nowhere to go — was channelled into this empty desert depression. The basin filled, then overflowed into a second, lower one, and the connecting channel became the waterfalls.

It was an engineering fix for a drainage problem, and it accidentally created a wetland. Within a couple of decades birds had colonised it in numbers, vegetation established along the shores, and it became one of the more important waterfowl sites in the region.

Protected in 1989

Egypt declared it a protected area partly for the birds and partly for the desert fauna of the surrounding land, which includes slender-horned gazelle, fennec fox, Egyptian mongoose and the rare Rüppell's fox. The gazelle is critically endangered and the reserve is one of its last footholds.

The tension

Wadi El Rayan is a genuine conservation success and a fragile one. It exists because of drainage water, which means its level and its salinity depend entirely on what agriculture upstream does. Off-road driving, litter and unmanaged visitor numbers have all done damage, and enforcement varies.

Stay on the tracks, take rubbish out with you, and treat the quiet parts of the reserve as what they are — habitat that happened by accident and could disappear the same way.