Paradise Island Hurghada

This guide to Paradise Island, off Hurghada, opens with old accounts claiming half of Earth's seagulls once nested on this scrap of desert rock, back when it was known only as Giftun and ignored by everyone but birds and fishermen. It follows how the island earned its new name and its status, in 1995, as the Red Sea coast's first marine protected area. That old seagull colony was once counted in the millions on this same stretch of sand.