Artificial, But Ecologically Correct

Twenty years after it was founded, the Red Sea resort of El Gouna in Egypt has become a model for environmentally-friendly tourism development: an artificial town which the world can learn a lot from. Taufig Khalil paid a visit

El Gouna (photo: picture-alliance/Bildagentur Huber)
El Gouna, the ecologically correct artificial Eden: a model for throughout Egypt and the region?

​​ The view on the journey north from Egypt's Hurghada airport to El Gouna is typical for Egypt: desert, sand and stone – pretty stunning. Unfortunately it is combined with a view of something equally typical for Egypt: rubbish – plastic bottles, tin cans, paper, every kind of detritus, scattered by the wind. Then a colourful town appears, you turn right, your details are checked at a gate and suddenly things look very different: smooth asphalt streets and not a scrap of litter to be seen. It is almost as if you have left Egypt.

"In a way you have," says Samih Sawiris and laughs heartily. "El Gouna is clean, which is not very Egyptian, El Gouna is well organised, also not very Egyptian. And there are no pushy salesmen dragging you into their shops like in most of the bazaars. El Gouna is actually pretty un-Egyptian," he says, speaking perfect German. He learned the language in Berlin, where he studied industrial engineering. Born in 1957 and raised as a Coptic Christian, with an estimated wealth of twenty billion dollars, he is the Rockefeller of the Nile.

The family's businesses include telecommunications, building, development and hotels. Cynics claim Sawaris was simply looking for somewhere to moor his yacht when he dropped anchor at El Gouna twenty years ago. At the time there was nothing there except litter-strewn desert and the lagoons which gave the place its name.

A home to 20,000 people

Today around 20,000 people live here, of which 17,000 are Egyptian. They are employed solely in tourism. With fourteen hotels of all ratings as well as countless holiday flats and houses, El Gouna is one of the most popular beach resorts on the Red Sea, above all because of its extreme cleanliness. The water in the extensive, branching network of lagoons is perfectly clean for swimming and the beaches are not only blinding white, they are spotless.

Samih Sawiris (photo:picture-alliance/ dpa)
"They say I'm crazy": Samih Sawiris, Egypt's Rockefeller

​​ There are schools and even a branch of the world-famous Alexandria Library; a local hospital with a decompression chamber for diving accidents, chemists, supermarkets, a few boutiques and a small bazaar. As well as this El Gouna includes two yacht harbours and an airport for private jets, all within a space of no more than ten square kilometres. The buildings are constructed with clay and natural stone in the Nubian style giving the town an authentic charm. No two hotels are placed next to each other and a network of public transport has been designed with buses and water taxis connecting the various lagoons to each other. El Gouna doesn't really have much to do with the rest of Egypt.

"It's a form of sustainability," says Sawiris. "If the people who work here enjoy living here, the guests notice it. It is our responsibility to ensure that the people who live here feel at home."

Recycling as millionaires' hobby

The exceptional cleanliness, almost reminiscent of Disneyland, is part of this. Throughout the town are colourful amphora-shaped bins for separating rubbish. The real separation goes on in areas hidden from the guests.

"We have achieved 98% recycling," Samih Sawiris says proudly, "but my goal is 100%. No-one has achieved that anywhere. I have the luxury to be able to afford this expensive hobby, and it is my ambition one day to be able to say, I've done it, we recycle 100% of our waste!"

These are certainly not empty marketing words; Sawiris spent a great deal of money building a recycling plant outside the gates of the town. The rubbish is sorted and processed here; plastic is melted down and made into plastic bags, clothes hangers or paving stones; aluminium is collected and sold. Glass goes to the brewery, whose malt residues are fed to the turkeys, while food waste is eaten by the sheep and cattle.

Around ninety people have been given jobs here, says Seif, the recycling engineer, but the plant does not make a profit: a millionaire's hobby indeed.

An ecological golf course in the midst of sand

(photo: El Gouna)
In El Gouna, it is even possible to play environmentally friendly golf in the desert: the resort's golf course uses waste water

​​ On the face of it a golf course in the desert sounds like an ecological catastrophe. The greens on the eighteen-hole course need three to four million litres of water a day. That would be enough to water a golf course in Europe for a month. Unlike in Europe however El Gouna's golf course uses waste water, piped in from Hurghada. It is treated for a day then used to water the course by hand. This system relies on a particular variety of grass, "Seashore Paspalum", which flourishes in the heat and tolerates extremely salty conditions.

Golfers have to adapt slightly to the conditions, as the ball does not roll as far as normal and sometimes whiffs a little. The water costs add up to around 850,000 Euro, but as noted, this is a millionaire's hobby. Everything in El Gouna belongs to Orascom, Samih Sawiris' company.

All employees are trained for three days before they start work. The aim is to waste as little energy and water as possible. El Gouna's hotels aim to become the model for hotels throughout Egypt and the world. It is popular with the tourists who are delighted to be able to save the planet by going on holiday!

Visionary or eco-eccentric?

While El Gouna becomes more and more ecological, other hoteliers shake their heads in amazement. "They say I'm crazy," Sawiris laughs. "They know that all this costs money. Genuinely acting sustainably, not just claiming to, is expensive. Because of our size we naturally have more responsibility than smaller hoteliers who, as tax-payers, see the responsibility as lying more with the state or the local authority. So I have to do more than the rest."

Maybe he will soon be doing it in Switzerland too. At the moment Orascom is investing around a billion dollars in the Swiss town of Andermatt. The sleepy mountain town is to become a Swiss El Gouna, with hotels of all grades and a golf course, everything authentically Swiss and of course sustainably designed. This is Samih Sawiris' new hobby.

Taufig Khalil

© Deutsche Welle / Qantara.de 2009

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