Ras Muhammad National Park

Introduction

Ras Muhammad was Egypt's first national park, established in 1983, and it remains one of the best diving and snorkelling grounds in the Red Sea. Its whole advantage comes down to geography: the Gulfs of Aqaba and Suez meet at the southern tip of Sinai, and the squeeze between them pushes cold deep water up continuously, delivering nutrients year-round. That upwelling is why the coral here grows the way it does. The park covers roughly 480 square kilometres, and it is the marine half that matters. On land there are cliffs, wadis, salt marshes and a mangrove channel; below the surface are coral walls with dramatic vertical relief. Shark Reef and Yolanda Reef drop hundreds of metres along vertical faces, visibility regularly exceeds 30 metres, and hard and soft corals stack in distinct bands. More than 220 coral species and over a thousand fish species have been recorded. Dugongs graze the seagrass beds and turtles feed in the shallow reef areas. The four headline sites each have their own character. Shark Reef is an isolated pinnacle rising out of deep water, purple sea fans near the surface. Yolanda Reef is known for steep walls and scale, with sharks and barracuda working the blue. Anemone City is a shallow plateau between six and fourteen metres covered in giant anemones, the easiest of the four for snorkellers. Jackfish Alley is about dense schools of yellowtail barracuda and jacks. The Eel Garden is a different spectacle entirely: hundreds of garden eels standing up out of the sand and swaying in the current. You do not need to dive to enjoy it. At Aqaba Beach and the Main Beach the coral sits only about two to five metres from shore, so snorkelling puts you among butterflyfish and angelfish with the occasional turtle. The lookouts on shore span both gulfs, the causeway of the water power station and the layered salt marshes. The 'Magic Lake' is a shallow lake so saline it turns opaque milky white, joined to the sea at high tide and cut off at low tide, ringed by genuine mangrove. The rules here are strict and worth knowing in advance. No fishing, no touching coral, no anchoring, and nothing natural carried out — shells, sand and rock fragments all count. Drones need a separate permit and dogs are not allowed in at all. These are not formalities: Red Sea coral takes decades to recover, so a single step is a decades-long debt.

✨ Highlights

🛈 Practical Info