Siwa Oasis

Siwa lies deep in the Western Desert near the Libyan border, roughly ten hours from Cairo. It is the most isolated inhabited place in Egypt and it feels it.

The people are Amazigh — Berber — and speak Siwi, a language unrelated to Arabic. The architecture, the food and the social customs are distinct from the rest of the country.

It is a genuinely different Egypt. Mud-and-salt buildings, palm groves fed by hundreds of springs, salt lakes of an unreal blue, and a way of life that the distance has protected. Until a paved road was built in the 1980s the journey took days by camel.

The Temple of the Oracle at Aghurmi is one of the more consequential ruins in the ancient world. Alexander the Great crossed the desert to consult it in 331 BC and left, according to the sources, having been greeted as the son of Amun. What was actually said has never been recorded.

Shali, the old fortified town, is a ruin of mud-brick towers built from kershef — salt-crusted mud — that melts in heavy rain. It rises above the modern town and you can walk up through it.

And there is the swimming. Cleopatra's Spring and dozens of others are natural pools you can get into, and the salt lakes are so saline you float without effort.

Siwa's oracle was famous across the Mediterranean world well before Alexander. Consulting it required a desert crossing, which was part of its authority.

The most famous story attached to the oasis is a disappearance. Herodotus records that a Persian army sent by Cambyses to destroy the oracle vanished in the desert on the way — fifty thousand men, the story says, swallowed by a sandstorm. No confirmed trace has ever been found, which has kept both the legend and the search alive.

The oasis kept a large degree of independence for most of its history, being too remote to govern easily, and was only firmly incorporated into Egypt in the nineteenth century.

Shali was founded in the thirteenth century as a fortified refuge and was largely abandoned after days of unusually heavy rain in the 1920s dissolved much of it.

In the Second World War the remoteness briefly became strategic: the British Long Range Desert Group used Siwa as a forward base for raids across the sand seas — one more chapter in a long history of the desert protecting the place.

• The Temple of the Oracle at Aghurmi
• The mud-brick ruins of Shali fortress
• Cleopatra's Spring and the other natural pools
• The salt lakes, blue-white and buoyant enough to float in
• The Mountain of the Dead, with rock-cut tombs
• Sunset from Fatnas Island, over the salt lake and the palm groves
• The Great Sand Sea, immediately west, for dune driving and sandboarding