November 2005

The ancient mining site of Mons Smaragdus, the single source of true emeralds (beryl) within the boundaries of the Roman Empire, located in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, today is enclosed in the recently instituted Wadi Gimal National Park. Mentioned by Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Ptolemy and other classic sources, it is really a famed site.
Until 1997, the time of our first visit of Wadi Gimal, the coastal region south of Marsa Alam was closed to tourism. A special permit was required by the military, which were patrolling all the beaches . South of Marsa Alam, at the time a small and impoverished fishermen village, no hotels were present. The only tourist structure was a small forestry belonging to the Cairo Shooting Club in the Marsa Alam harbour. Traveling to the region was tiring and difficult being the last airport found in Hurgada. In November 2005 the reality was completely different. A new international airport was built in a very short time and tourists have already traveled by thousands to the newly constructed tourist resort that now dotted the coast from Quseir to Marsa Alam and from there to the neighborhoods of Ras Banas.

The ongoing development of the Marsa Alam coast is mimicking the same kind of real estate boom that changed forever the once desert coast, a fantastic environment that sadly very few will remember. At present, direct flight connects Marsa Alam to Milan and other European cities. Many holidaymakers heard about the place or have already been there more than once time… On the contrary very few Europeans know about the existence of the Wadi Gimal National park even if the monumental gates of the park were built on the main road, just in front of the luxury tourist resort of Sham Alam, very near to the diving centre that each day escort platoons of divers to the marine wonders of the Red Sea. Near the diving club there is a small unimpressive building that host the visitor centre and the administrative office of the park.
Considering wildlife and geology the Wadi Gimal hydrographic basin is a very important region: in fact, it is one of the larges basin of the Egyptian red Sea coast discharging its water in the Red Sea: thanks to its southern position it benefit of the springtime monsoonal rains that swinging from south to north sometimes hit this coastal desert. The large area of the basin allow these episodic rainfalls to collect in flash-floods ensuring the prolonged existence of water in the fluvial deposits of wadi near to the surface. For these reason there is always green vegetation in the wadi and the many acacias are particularly healthy. Many animals lives in this favorable environment. May be Wadi Gimal is the place were in Egypt is more easy to spot gazelles and many species of rare birds.
A brilliant tourist annotated on the Sham Alam Hotel guestbook: April 2005 was a rainy day.

In these short account, Terramata do not intend to provide a description of the real attractive of the park or the many archaeological sites related to the ancient emerald mines (abandoned after the discovery in the XVI century of the superior quality gemstones of the New World). The interested reader is encouraged to gather information locally and to read the recent archaeological paper by Sidebotham et al. (2004) published by The Sahara Journal number 15. This paper is a really good one; it is based on the first modern survey of the archaeological sites (not yet completed) and describes the finding of the first systematic diggings. We would just like to shows some of the digital pictures we collected during a one-day tour through the park. Our tour was very lucky because at present, without a special authorization, it is no more possible to drive a 4x4 car in Wadi Gimal and therefore it is quite difficult to organize an otherwise easy round trip.

In comparison to the 1997 year, also the GPS device changed a lot improving a lot. Now a typical GPS handheld unit has the capability to accept customized vector cartography. With the SRTM data, freely released on the Internet by NASA in 2004, to create a quite accurate vector map with elevation contours of every region of the Earth is a matters of minutes. With freeware like fGIS and Mapedit it takes just an hour or less to have a good customized cartography of regions that are certainly covered by modern maps but that are not easily available to the general public because of the usual military or security paranoia.