First Time in Sharm

First trip to Sharm el Sheikh. Sonesta Club Resort. Excellent property, coral reef still alive back then. Ras Mohammed nature reserve spectacular for its colours and the wildlife present. Saint Catherine's Monastery amid a succession of deserts, beautiful in colours and forms. Grand Canyon Kolorado stressful but interesting at the same time. For me, a lover of the sea, it was a beautiful experience that, as you will read, I repeated later on. The modernity of the city is matched by a succession of extraordinary coral reefs, such as those of Ras Mohammed. The excursion to Saint Catherine's Monastery, at the foot of Mount Sinai, has become a fixed stop for anyone holidaying in the Red Sea.

The splendid basilica, built inside this kind of fortified little town by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century and embellished with magnificent mosaics, is a marvel of Byzantine architecture set in the middle of a rocky desert. Even today, the monastery is inhabited by Greek Orthodox monks and holds precious treasures: besides the sarcophagus with the saint's body, there is a library with thousands of ancient manuscripts in Greek, Syriac and Arabic (permission for the visit is requested on site) and over 2,000 icons from the early Christian, Byzantine and post-Byzantine eras.