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Egypt’s empty resort

Arseny Neskhodimov

Hurghada It is a main tour­ist cen­ter and third largest city in Egypt loc­ated on the Red Sea coast.
The city was foun­ded in the early 20th cen­tury. Until a few years ago it was a small fish­ing vil­lage but since the 1980s has been con­tinu­ally enlarged by Egyp­tian and for­eign investors to become the lead­ing coastal resort on the Red Sea.

Hurghada is known for its water­s­ports activ­it­ies, night­life and warm weather. Numer­ous Europeans spend their Christ­mas and New Year hol­i­days in the city, mainly Ger­mans and Rus­si­ans but only a few of them know how the city looks like. People usu­ally stay behind the hotel’s walls and rarely go out since they buy pack­age tour and there is noth­ing to see but the sea. Hurghada used to be a very attract­ive place to buy prop­erty since it ridicu­lously cheap here major­ity of buy­ers were Russian.

Nowadays Hurghada looks for­saken. The num­ber of Rus­sian tour­ists dropped dra­mat­ic­ally because of devalu­ation of the Rus­sian cur­rency. Today the streets are empty and the whole city its an end­less con­struc­tion most of the pro­ject sites seem to be aban­doned forever in anti­cip­a­tion of the new dwell­ers.

Tags: economy, Egypt, Hurgada, resort, tourists