FEBRUARY 2025 DEPARTURES:

02 – 09 February, 09 – 16 February, 16 – 23 February, 23 February – 02 March

Near the city of Aswan, the Great Dam on the Nile, inaugurated in 1971, changed forever the geography of an entire region and the fate of a population with its incredible past. Only the goodwill of Unesco and the cooperation of European states wrested from the waters of the nascent Lake Nasser, in a race against time, the priceless treasures, testimonies of the Nile Valley’s most important millenary civilisations, which would otherwise have sunk irreparably into the abyss.

Entirely dismantled and reassembled over the course of some twenty years, in a position set back from the banks that were progressively conquered by the rising water level, the temples and monuments from various Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Hellenistic-Roman, Coptic and Ottoman eras, the undisputed jewels of Nubia, were the subject of the most colossal preservation campaign ever mounted.

Setting sail aboard a dahabeya and navigating between the first and second cataracts of the Nile, an area occupied today by the Nasser reservoir, we can only be thankful that we can still enjoy such an archaeological prodigy. Should the need arise, the story of the salvation of such architectural treasures adds even more pathos to the cruise of wonders!