Luxor development plan: use the past to build its future
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Out with the new and in with the old: this is Luxor in a nutshell. With plans to turn the city into one of the world’s largest open air museum, the Egyptian government has busily set about demolishing eyesores such as the New Winter Palace and obstructions such as the hardscrabble village of Gourna. Meanwhile, they are preserving everything that is fine and ancient– all so that tourists can commingle with a carefully curated version of Luxor’s past.
In July 2004 Samir Farag was appointed governor of Luxor by President Hosni Mubarak with a mission to renovate Luxor’s antique sites and redevelop the city as a world-class tourist destination. The task entailed removing all the signs of human habitation that had, over the years, built up on and around the city’s historic sites.
Farag’s first task was to modernize the city’s infrastructure: electricity, sewage, water, phone lines and roads. He is opening up the Avenue of the Sphinxes, a three-kilometer pathway, once lined with thousands of Sphinxes, that links the Karnak and Luxor temples, which was used each year as a processional route during the festival of Opet to celebrate the seasonal flooding of the Nile. Go there now and you see a vast open area that permits, for the first time in hundreds of years, a view of the Nile and the temple of Hatshepsut high up on the Theban Hills.
There are now highways linking Luxor to the Red Sea resorts of Hurghada and Marsa Alam, so that people on holiday there can make day trips to the city. Six thousand tourists make that journey every day now, all of them bringing money to spend in Luxor. The city has an airport terminal that can now accommodate up to seven million passengers a year; a new railway station and souk; a hospital; a cultural center providing work and training for the city’s 30,000-strong Nubian community; a women’s center; a large wireless internet zone; a library and a heritage center. An Imax cinema is also on the way.
Overall the governor says the city has spent 1.2 billion Egyptian pounds on infrastructure since he’s arrived – changes that have already had an impact on the city’s economy as a whole.
But still the opposition persists: earlier this year a demonstration of 3,000 people outside Karnak almost turned into a riot. A court case protesting the Gourna evictions is pending – marking the last hope of Old Gourna’s few remaining few residents.
But that only means it’s time for the next stage of the plan, Farag believes. Just around the corner is a development sure to create new livelihoods for the inhabitants of places like Gourna. The governor says he’s building new resorts capable of holding tens of thousand of people outside the city; that Luxor will soon have the biggest youth hostel in the Middle East; that a forest of jatropha trees, whose seeds contain up to 40 per cent oil, is being grown to provide the city with engine oil; that treated wastewater is being used to irrigate 22,000 acres of farmland; that investment zones are being opened to bring in new businesses. Farag thinks the city can double the annual number of tourists it currently hosts. In the end, he says, people will appreciate what he’s done.
Excerpted from an article by Simon Mars for The National
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