Photo : Rabax63 — CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Photo : David Broad — CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
Aswan · The Dam
Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser
The work that stopped the Nile flood: the river on one side, a freshwater sea on the other.
The dam was built between 1960 and 1970 and inaugurated in 1971, with Soviet money and Soviet engineers, after Western funding was withdrawn. It is an embankment of rock and clay close to four kilometres long, with a road running across it: on one side a lake with no far bank, on the other the river setting off north again, narrow and green, the power station between them. What it delivered is real — electricity for the whole country, a reserve of water that carries Egypt through bad years, an end to flooding — but the flood also brought down the silt that fertilised the fields. Since then the land is fed with fertiliser and the Delta coast is losing ground to the sea. At the western end stands the Egyptian-Soviet Friendship Monument, a tower shaped like a lotus flower. Behind the embankment, the water runs south with no visible edge, and the desert stops dead at the shoreline. This is Lake Nasser, which filled from the 1960s onwards as the works advanced and continues into Sudanese territory under the name Lake Nubia. Those granite islets are the tops of hills, and below that water lie the Nubian villages that had to be left behind.
The extra bit
Stand on the downstream side, the river side: that is where you see what the dam changed, the water setting off narrow and green between two deserts while behind you it has no bank at all. You touch the lake at Kalabsha, a separate stop with its own ticket and its own boat.
Know before you go
This is a strategic structure and it is guarded: you enter through a checkpoint, you stay on the part open to the public, and what you may photograph is a question for the guard post. There is no shade, nowhere to sit and no café on the embankment, the wind is strong and the heat climbs quickly. Seen from here, the lake is a surface without detail, and the heat haze eats the horizon by mid-morning. Some agencies sell the dam as a half day: it is a stop of twenty minutes or so, and staying longer shows you nothing more. A cruise on the lake or a fishing trip is a service in its own right, measured in days rather than hours: it is not the continuation of a visit to the dam. Settle the order of the morning with your driver: the Unfinished Obelisk, the dam and Philae are on the same road south of town, and it is the doubling back that costs you time.
