Siwa is an oasis 19 metres below sea level, fed by some 200 springs and green with roughly 280,000 date palms, with the Great Sand Sea beginning beyond the last garden wall. The people who farm it are Berber, not Arab, and speak Siwi, an eastern Berber language that survives nowhere else in Egypt. Their old town, Shali, went up in 1203 out of kershef, blocks of salt-saturated clay that dry as hard as cement and dissolve in water. It rained for three days in 1926, the walls slumped, and Shali was left to melt. You can climb the melted walls today, rebuilt in the same salt and clay after a restoration reopened the town in 2020. On the rock of Aghurmi above the palms stands the temple of the oracle of Amun, which Alexander the Great crossed hundreds of kilometres of desert to question in 331 BC.
The turquoise pools in every photograph of Siwa are not a natural wonder. They are pits cut by a working salt quarry east of town, filled with brine so dense you lie back on it as if on a bench. The gentler water is Cleopatra's Spring, a round stone pool bubbling under the palms. Beyond the gardens the dunes start, and the nights out there are as dark as Egypt gets. Autumn is when the oasis works: dates ripen from October and pickers climb the trunks on palm-fibre belts. At the October full moon the men go up Gebel Dakrur for the three-day Siyaha feast. The farming system itself was added to the UN food agency's agricultural heritage list in 2016. The threat now is water rather than drought — irrigation runoff has swollen the salt lakes until they are drowning the groves they drain from.