Aswan High Dam Tours & Tickets

Be clear about what the Aswan High Dam is as a visit: it is a viewpoint on top of a very large embankment, with a monument at one end, a checkpoint, and a great deal of water on one side. It is not beautiful. Nobody goes for the architecture. It is on almost every Aswan itinerary because of what it did, and it did more to change Egypt than anything else built in the twentieth century.

Most tours give it twenty to thirty minutes, usually as the first or last stop of a morning that also takes in Philae and the Unfinished Obelisk. That is about right for the site itself. What follows is what makes those twenty minutes worth having.

What it actually did

Before 1970 the Nile flooded every summer. The flood was the basis of Egyptian agriculture for five thousand years: it watered the fields and, crucially, it laid down a fresh layer of silt each year that fertilised them for free. It was also unreliable. A low flood meant famine and a high one meant destruction, and the whole country's fortunes turned on a measurement.

The High Dam ended that. It holds the flood in Lake Nasser and releases water on a schedule, which means year-round irrigation, several harvests instead of one, land reclaimed from desert, and protection from both drought and inundation. It also generates a substantial share of Egypt's electricity.

The costs were equally large. The silt now settles in the lake instead of on the fields, so Egyptian agriculture depends on manufactured fertiliser in a way it never did. The Delta coastline, no longer fed with sediment, is eroding. And the reservoir drowned Lower Nubia.

Nubia, which is the part usually skipped

Filling Lake Nasser flooded the Nubian homeland along the river south of Aswan. Something in the order of a hundred thousand Nubians in Egypt and Sudan were resettled, most of them moved to new villages well away from the river their culture was built around. Nubian communities in Aswan today are the descendants of that displacement, and the loss is present in Nubian music and writing in a way it is not present on any information board at the dam.

If your itinerary includes a Nubian village visit, which many Aswan programmes do, it is worth doing the dam first and the village second rather than the other way round. The sequence makes sense of both.

The temples that were moved

The same flooding threatened the monuments of Lower Nubia, and the response was the largest archaeological rescue operation ever attempted. Under a UNESCO campaign through the 1960s, Abu Simbel was cut into blocks and reassembled on higher ground, and the temple complex of Philae was dismantled and rebuilt on a neighbouring island. Several smaller temples were moved as well, some of them out of the country to the museums that had contributed funding.

This is why Abu Simbel and Philae are on your itinerary at all. Both would be under water. The campaign is also the reason the World Heritage system exists in its modern form: it was created in the aftermath.

The politics, briefly

The dam was built between 1960 and 1970 with Soviet finance and engineering, and it became Soviet only after the United States and Britain withdrew their funding offer in 1956. Nasser's response to that withdrawal was to nationalise the Suez Canal, which triggered the Suez Crisis. The dam is therefore not only an engineering project but the pivot of a geopolitical episode that reshaped the region.

The monument at the western end, a large lotus-shaped tower, commemorates the Soviet and Egyptian cooperation that built it.

Practical notes

There are photography restrictions and a security presence, since the dam is critical infrastructure. Follow what your guide tells you; this is not a place to improvise with a drone.

There is little shade on top and it is usually windy, which is a relief in summer and cold in January mornings more often than people expect.

Is it worth visiting?

As a sight, no. As the explanation for almost everything else you will see in Aswan, yes. Philae stands where it does because of this dam. Abu Simbel sits sixty metres above its original position because of this dam. The Nubian villages are where they are because of this dam. Twenty minutes and a guide who will tell you the whole story is a good trade.

If your time in Aswan is very short and you are choosing, Philae and the Unfinished Obelisk are the better sites. But they read differently once you have stood on the dam.