Hurghada began the twentieth century as a huddle of fishermen's houses beside a naval station, founded in 1905 on a then-empty stretch of Egypt's Red Sea coast. Today it is the capital of the Red Sea Governorate and the country's busiest seaside city, its resorts, marinas and dive schools strung along roughly 40 kilometres of shoreline. It is a place best understood layer by layer — and a self-guided audio tour is the easiest way to peel those layers back, letting the stories of souqs, mosques and coral islands play as you wander at your own pace.
Two towns in one
Old Hurghada survives in El Dahar, the original village district, where narrow streets funnel toward a bustling souq piled high with spices, shisha pipes and Red Sea sponges. Down the coast, Sekalla and the modern Hurghada Marina feel like a different city: café terraces, yacht masts and the elegant El Mina Mosque, whose minarets have become Hurghada's most recognisable landmark. An audio guide bridges the two, tracing how a fishing village — and, later, an oil-era outpost — reinvented itself as an international resort within a single generation.
The reef on the doorstep
The Red Sea is why most people come. Offshore lie the Giftun Islands, a protected marine area of white-sand beaches with around fourteen swimming and snorkelling spots, including the famously clear shallows of Orange Bay. Dive boats head out daily to coral gardens and wreck sites, while the Hurghada Grand Aquarium brings more than a thousand marine animals within reach of those who prefer to stay dry. The water averages a mild 24°C across the year, and rain is little more than a rumour — a few millimetres annually at most.
Beyond the beach
Half an hour north is El Gouna, a canal-laced planned resort often nicknamed Egypt's Venice; to the south lies quieter Sahl Hasheesh and its manicured bay. Inland, the Eastern Desert offers Bedouin camps, quad-bike trails and star-filled night skies. Between a morning on the reef and a sunset in the dunes, let the audio guides fill in the history — of pearl fishers, oil prospectors and the improbable rise of a village that became the capital of the Red Sea coast.