Siwa Town Travel Guide

Most visitors rate SIWA TOWN and the pools, rocks and ruins around as the oasis's main attractions, and not many bother to visit the outlying villages. Siwa Town has grown as its population has risen to 18,000 (at least 1000 of them from outside the oasis), and people have moved into breeze-block houses or low-rise flats, forsaking their traditional mud-brick dwellings as their ancestors had previously abandoned the fortified hilltop city of Shali, whose ruins overlook the modern town. A triumphal arch and broad roads debouch onto a central market area, but the town slips away into a maze of alleyways, and loses itself amidst the encircling palms. Boys driving donkey carts transport fodder and decorously wrapped Siwan women, and the braying of donkeys resounds from every quarter of town. After dark, a thousand stars emerge and Siwa's isolation from the world beyond the Great Sand Sea becomes almost palpable.