Luxury Travel Publisher Assouline Puts Egypt's El Gouna on the Page

From Kyoto and Marrakech to Capri, Miami and Tangier, Parisian luxury publisher Assouline’s Travel Series has become something of a passport to places with a story to tell. Now, Egypt’s Red Sea town of El Gouna is getting its own 240-page addition, with a new coffee table book titled ‘El Gouna: The Red Sea Riviera.’

As a seaside destination, El Gouna is an unusual kind of Egyptian coastal story in itself; one that began, in 1989, with the rather audacious proposition that people might trade Cairo’s honking symphony and shoulder-to-shoulder streets for a life on a far-flung stretch of land, where there was little more than sand and coral. Yet, gradually, the first villas went up, the marina followed, and before long the map was being redrawn with islands, lagoons, beaches and entire neighbourhoods threaded between water and desert.

Thirty-six years on, what started as a handful of summer houses has swelled into a little world of its own, so thick with rituals and regulars, so full of Gounies who came for a season and stayed for a lifetime, it actually filled a whole book.

Now, the considerable task of telling that story fell to three creative minds: travel journalist Maria Shollenbarger, who spent time with the townfolk to get a feel for the community that has grown around its waterways; photographer Felix Speller, who brought an eye for the shapes and textures that make the place so recognisable; and Greek artist Athan Mytilinaios, who captures its many faces through his own Mediterranean-inspired illustrations.

The result is a lavishly assembled visual love letter, one that is now enshrined in Assouline’s Classics Collection, giving El Gouna the sort of permanence usually reserved for places whose names have been steeped in centuries of lore.