Egypt
Mons Porphyrites
The Roman Empire's only source of imperial purple stone, quarries still scarring red mountains.
The quarry face is still fresh, as if the last Roman mason set down his tools yesterday. Columns lie half-cut from the mountainside, abandoned when the empire's logistics gave out. The stone is imperial porphyry — the purple-red rock reserved for emperors — and this is the only place on Earth it was ever quarried.
Mons Porphyrites sits in the Eastern Desert at Gebel Abu Dokhan — Smoky Mountain — about 40 kilometres inland from the Red Sea coast. From the first century CE, Rome cut imperial porphyry here under military guard, the purple stone restricted to emperors by decree, hauled out for sarcophagi, columns and sculpture. Workshops, houses and quarry faces still stand half-buried in the sand, and the visit now runs as a guided day trip out of Hurghada.
Friends
Take the guided day trip as a group — two hours out from Hurghada, the quarry to yourselves, old-town fish after.
- Private ownership of this purple stone was illegal — everything cut here belonged to emperors.
- Partially cut columns and unfinished sarcophagi lie where the workers left them, first to fifth century.
- The Roman settlement survives in outline — temple, bathhouse, wells and barracks in red mountains.
- It runs as a guided day trip from Hurghada now — about two hours out, operator-led, no marked tracks.
Lunch is whatever the day-trip operator packs out of Hurghada — eat properly before you leave.
The reward for the desert day is dinner in Hurghada's old town, fish straight from the display.
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Egypt
Roman aqueducts tunnelling beneath deep desert to water farmland the Sahara has since taken back.
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Stalactites hanging in a desert cave where someone painted giraffes when the Sahara was green.
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Desert mountains plunging into reef walls where freedive ropes disappear into blue-black nothing.