Abu Simbel
UNESCO World Heritage Site: Nubian Monuments From Abu Simbel To Philae (1979). Two Rock Temples Of Ramses II Fronted By Four Twenty Metre Colossi, Cut From The Cliff In The Thirteenth Century BC And Sawn Into More Than A Thousand Blocks In The 1960s To Lift Them Above The Rising Lake · Abu Simbel, Aswan
Ramses II had two temples cut into a sandstone cliff above the Nile near the Sudanese border in the thirteenth century BC, the larger one fronted by four seated colossi of himself twenty metres high, the smaller dedicated to his queen Nefertari. Three thousand years later the Aswan High Dam was going to drown them, and between 1964 and 1968 an international engineering effort sawed both temples into more than a thousand blocks, lifted them sixty metres up the cliff and rebuilt them inside an artificial hill, reproducing the original orientation so precisely that twice a year the rising sun still reaches down the whole length of the great temple to light the gods in the sanctuary. That is the thing to understand before you come: you are looking at both a pharaonic monument and the most ambitious heritage rescue ever attempted. It is 280 kilometres south of Aswan, which means a long desert drive before dawn or a short flight.
West bank of Lake Nasser about 280 km south of Aswan and 40 km north of the Sudanese border, Abu Simbel, Aswan, Egypt
Open daily from early morning until late afternoon, with a shorter winter day. The timing of a visit is dictated by how you arrive: the road convoy tradition out of Aswan put most visitors at the gate between mid-morning and midday, so the hour after opening and the last two hours of the afternoon are the quiet ones, and anyone with their own driver or an overnight in Abu Simbel village can have the temples nearly to themselves. Whether a formal convoy still applies has changed, so confirm with a driver rather than assuming either way. Flights from Aswan take about forty-five minutes and are timed for a short visit on the ground. A sound and light show runs in the evening. The sun festival, when the sanctuary is lit, falls on 22 February and 22 October and fills every bed in the area.