Soma Bay

Soma Bay is a strange entry in a coastline I’ve otherwise tried to describe in terms of fishing villages and Ottoman forts, because it is neither of those things — it’s a purpose-built peninsula south of Safaga, developed from scratch in the nineties as a self-contained resort zone, with a single access road, a handful of large hotels, a Gary Player-designed golf course improbably carved into desert scrub, and almost nothing that could be called a town. I went in expecting to find it soulless. I mostly did not, and that surprised me.

What Soma Bay gets right is the water. The peninsula juts out just far enough into the Red Sea that the house reef drops off quickly from most of the shorefront, and because the whole area is managed as a single development rather than a patchwork of independent hotels competing for beach frontage, the reef in front of it has been left largely alone. I did a shore dive straight off the sand one morning, no boat required, and was thirty meters over a wall within ten minutes of entering the water, looking down at parrotfish working over the coral in a kind of unhurried, systematic way that felt like watching someone tend a garden.

The kitesurfing school here has a reputation as one of the best-run on the coast, largely because Soma Bay’s geography creates a wide, shallow, current-free lagoon that’s close to ideal for beginners — I watched a woman in her sixties take her first kitesurfing lesson and get up on the board by her third attempt, something I never managed on choppier water elsewhere. In the evenings I walked the shoreline path between hotels, past a spa built into the cliffs that pumps seawater through its treatment rooms, and sat on a rock watching the sun go down over the Gulf of Suez side of things with nobody else around for a stretch that felt almost private, which is not a word I expected to use about a resort development.

I’ll say plainly that Soma Bay isn’t a place for anyone chasing the kind of Egypt I usually write about — there’s no old town, no market, no call to prayer drifting over a working harbor. But if you want a few days of genuinely excellent, low-effort diving and water sports bracketed by comfort, it does exactly what it sets out to do, and does it without pretending to be something else.

When to go: October through April for the most comfortable temperatures, given there’s little shade beyond the hotel grounds. Kitesurfing conditions are strongest from May through September when the wind picks up.