Lake Nasser and the Nubian Temples

UNESCO World Heritage Site: Nubian Monuments From Abu Simbel To Philae (1979). One Of The Largest Reservoirs On Earth, Five Hundred Kilometres Long, Holding The Temples That Were Cut Up And Moved Out Of Its Way In The 1960s And Reachable Only By Boat Or By The Dam Road · Aswan, Aswan

When the High Dam closed in 1970 it created a reservoir five hundred kilometres long, drowned the whole of Egyptian Nubia, displaced about a hundred thousand people and put two dozen temples under water unless they could be moved. Some were: Abu Simbel and Philae have their own rows, and the rest - Kalabsha, Beit el-Wali, Wadi es-Sebua, Dakka, Maharraqa, Amada, Derr and the tomb of Pennut - were cut up and re-erected on new ground along the shore, where almost nobody goes to see them. Kalabsha sits beside the dam and is reachable in an afternoon from Aswan. The others are strung down a lake with no road, visited only by the handful of cruise boats that work south of the dam. The lake itself is the other half of the story: a freshwater sea in the middle of the Sahara with crocodiles, enormous Nile perch, migrating birds and nothing at all on its western shore for four hundred kilometres. Kalabsha, beside the dam, is the one you can reach in an afternoon.

The reservoir behind the High Dam, with the relocated temples of Kalabsha, Wadi es-Sebua and Amada along its shores, Aswan, Aswan, Egypt

Kalabsha and Beit el-Wali, beside the High Dam, keep daytime hours with a ticket; whether they are reached by road from the dam or only by a short boat hop depends on the water level, so ask in Aswan. The southern temples - Wadi es-Sebua, Dakka, Amada, Derr - have no road access and are visited on Lake Nasser cruises, which sail between Aswan and Abu Simbel on fixed three and four night itineraries with their own schedules; whether they are running the full temple programme is worth confirming. Fishing safaris run out of Aswan for a week at a time. The dam road carries a security presence and the usual rules about photography apply. Nothing on the lake is a casual drop-in: it is a boat, a tour or the dam-side temples only.

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