Sand Castles

Deep in Egypt’s Western Desert, an ancient oasis is home to one of the world’s most extraordinary hotels. Gisela Williams pays a visit and discovers a balm for today’s hyper-connected life.

- Gisela Williams

FROM THE PLANE, I looked down on a patchwork of emerald palm groves, rows of silver olive trees, and vast salt-ringed lakes that seemed to glow in psychedelic shades of cerulean and aquamarine. Surrounding these pockets of lushness was an ocean of sand, and the combination filled me with a sense of isolation that was almost overwhelming.

I was about to land in Siwa, an oasis in Egypt that includes a town of 20,000 people, a few historically significant sites, and a handful of small hotels. It lies about 563 kilometres west of Cairo as the crow flies, and 48 kilometres east of the Libyan border.

My journey had been more than 20 years in the making, sparked by a conversation with Peter Beard, the legendary photographer, artist, and writer. He had told me that one of his favourite hotels was a place called Adrère Amellal, which resembled a fortress made of sand in Egypt's Western Desert.

The hotel was in Siwa, a place that, he explained, was part of Egypt but had the feeling of an independent state: for millennia, generations of Berber tribes had lived there under their own laws. The heart of ancient Siwa was Shali (now also known as the Old Town), a fortified village built in the 13th century to protect the community from attacks by neighboring tribes.

In 1926, a series of massive rainstorms destroyed many of Shali's buildings, which were made kershef, a mixture of salt and clay. And while some of those structures still stand, the residents of modern Siwa-the majority of whom are descendants of the Berbers-live nearby in homes made of stone. The streets buzz with motorbikes and vendors selling falafel and fresh aish baladi, the ubiquitous traditional flatbread.