The last working-class summer in the mediterranean city of Ras El-Bar
Mahmoud Awad, an administrator at a private school in Tanta, counts among the relatively fortunate of Ras El-Bar's vacationers: he can still afford to sleep in town. Others have said goodbye to their nights in the old summer town, and the season has shrunk for them into a single day that ends when the sun goes down.
It's true that Ras El-Bar has not wholly given up its character as a working-class summer town for people of modest means. But the peninsula, which belongs to Damietta governorate, sits at the edge of a vast transformation that could strip Mahmoud, and everyone in his bracket, of the few days on an open beach, the walks down Nile Street, the evening spent on the pier watching the sun go down.
This year, his stay was cut to just three days. The nightly rent for the typical “esha”—once a wooden hut, now more often a chalet with two rooms and a living room—runs at 1,200 Egyptian pounds. Add the broker’s commission and another 250 pounds to top up the electricity card, and the costs quickly squeeze any longer stay.
At this rate, the summer of 2026, now ending, could be the last in Ras El-Bar’s life as a working-class resort. Buyers are waiting to take delivery of their units in the luxury Doray Bay development in 2027, at no less than seven million pounds each. That price tag will draw in a new social strata: owners of homes rather than guests in them. They’ll join the likes of those at the Steigenberger hotel, which opened some years ago and claimed for itself a panoramic view over the point where the Mediterranean meets the Nile.
Al Manassa’s reporting from Ras El-Bar shows just how far lower-income Egyptians’ ability to hold their place in the old resort has slipped. Rents on the summer huts have climbed, dragging up the cost of daily life. So has the price of simply reaching the beach and renting a chair and umbrella, as the state expands its practice of leasing stretches of shoreline to the private sector.
The way we summered
Mahmoud compares this year’s short stay with what he was used to in the past: half of August in a hut his father rented, then a week in the first years of his marriage, and now just three nights this summer with his wife and two daughters.
Rents on huts in the summer of 2026 start at 500 pounds a night for the most thinly furnished units, far from the water, and reach an average of 3,000 pounds for those close to it. A hotel room runs between 600 and 4,000 pounds.
In a sample of Dubizzle listings from the start of this month, most two-room units on offer ran between 800 and 1,400 pounds a day, and larger units near the pier reached two thousand.
A week's stay therefore costs between 5,600 and 9,800 pounds, or 70–122% of the minimum wage, which stands at eight thousand, with transport, food and services still to be added.
The government announced a rise in the minimum wage for the public sector and the civil service in April, and began applying it in July.
Out by sunset
As rents rose and the cost of a holiday doubled, Ras El-Bar became, in the eyes of most of the people who come to it, a day-trip destination, above all for those from the nearer Delta governorates. Among them is Abdel Moneim El Sayed, who supports a household of six and works at a fertilizer company in Nabroh, in Daqahliya.
Since the summer of 2019, Abdel Moneim has been taking his family to Ras El-Bar for a single day to avoid paying rent he calls “over the top.” Back then, he told Al Manassa, “the usual price ran between 300 and 500 a night, and up to 1,500 for the units near the water.”
Adel El-Husseiny, a security guard at a private company, follows the same pattern: a day that begins at first light and ends at sunset. That rhythm has let him come to Ras El-Bar five times this summer. Each time, he spends one day with his sisters and their families on a trip that starts by renting a microbus in Diyarb Negm, Sharqiya, to carry the extended family—eleven of them—along with the beach chairs and food cooked in advance.
“Ras El-Bar is still the place. You just have to come prepared,” Husseiny told Al Manassa, laying out his plan for cutting costs as far as they'll go. “We split the van, food comes from home, we sit on the free stretch. If everyone bought lunch and sat at a café and rented an umbrella, the day's done for.”
What he describes is easy enough to see on the sand, above all in the food: home cooking, prepared by families together, pots of stuffed pepper and zucchini at the center of it, and whatever else the public beaches let through the gate, along with everything a day at the sea requires if it is not going to cost anything: the water cooler, the pitchers of juice made up at home, the bags of fruit.
‘Wicked Coast’ creep
Beyond the rising rent on huts, a set of costs has been tinting the city, little by little, in the colors of the ‘wicked’ North Coast, Egypt's gated-compound Riviera. Most of these costs are attached to spending a day on the beach, and they harden the city’s new shape as a place you come to for one day.
Mahmoud needed 300 pounds for an umbrella and four chairs, and he laughs about it. “Ras El-Bar's still within our reach. It's the sitting down on the beach that has slipped away.”
Ahmed, a man in his twenties who runs a stand for umbrellas and chairs on one stretch of Beach 77, explains to Al Manassa that a set starts at a hundred pounds on quiet days and climbs with the crowd and with how close it sits to the water.
The price drops if you live in town. “If somebody tells you they paid 300 or 350 for the week, they probably held the same set all week and cut a deal. Not like the one who turns up Friday and wants to get on the front row, and of course the guys here jack up the prices when they see a crowd.”
The broker in the dock
The charge against the middlemen comes up again and again among vacationers: that they are the main reason prices have risen and the place has turned into a resort for those who can afford it. One regular went as far as to float a proposal on hut-booking Facebook groups that owners rent their units directly, so the town could recover “the reputation it lost to greed and bad treatment.”
A broker answered sarcastically that anyone who turns down three thousand pounds for an air-conditioned apartment in the front row is free to go looking for a three-hundred-pound unit somewhere further out.
“People say it's the brokers that send prices through the roof, but the prices they seek are 500 pounds for front row units with an elevator and AC!” says Ali Selim*, who owns a small real estate office near 77th Street, on the charge that brokers drive prices up and pocket the difference between what the owner asks and what the tenant pays.
For fourteen years Ali has worked off a phone crowded with photographs of rental units, from interior apartments with old furniture to new, wide, air-conditioned ones looking straight out at the sea. Acceptable interior apartments this season start at 700 or 800 pounds, he told Al Manassa, while front-row units go past two thousand, especially on weekends.
He admits the booking has got shorter. “Back then customers asked about fifteen days. Then it went down to a week. Now most of the talk is two nights, three.”
Beaches within the beach
The widening policy of leasing the sea-facing sections of the beaches to private cafeterias has done its part to wear down the working-class character of the city, even though most of the beaches remain public and free, nominally. They are held to the cafeterias, which control the price of sitting by the sea, whether under the umbrellas or in the space around them, taken up by tables, chairs and giant screens, until there is no room left to move or to play.
Damietta governorate raised the rent on the cafeteria operators this year by 25% in one fell swoop, which was suspected to feed through, naturally enough, into increases in the cost of the services they sell to vacationers.
The only way to avoid these costs is to fall back from the water and stay in the free part, bring your own umbrella and chairs, and look for a gap to reach the sea through. That is the option a woman in her forties had taken, spending the day on the beach with her two sisters and their children. She told Al Manassa, joking: “The first thing we asked was where the free part is. If I'm going to pay 300 to sit in front of the sea, I'll spread out behind and see it anyway.”
Architect and researcher Amr Abotawila sees the expansion of beach leasing to cafés alongside the flow of investment into luxury tourism projects in the city as two sides of the same coin: the general economic logic behind the expansion of real estate investment. “The state has generally turned into a real estate developer more than a service provider,” he told Al Manassa. For him, this logic is what directs the work of state institutions and the way they put their resources to use.
Abotawila notes that the priority governing policy is recovering money at a fast return from real estate operations and putting it back into circulation. That’s why we see large investment inflows and the spread of cafés along the beaches—both attempts to maximize the return from land and property, and therefore to target those with money to spend. The result, he says, will accelerate “class replacement,” where a new class is installed in place of the working-class visitors to the city.
A walk along whatever is left of the strip is enough to show how far the beaches leased to the private sector have taken over Ras El Bar's shoreline, and how plainly the crowding differs between those beaches and the ones that are free throughout, particularly since Damietta governorate's central offices announced last year an auction of ten-year usufruct rights over beaches to the private sector.
A field survey by the Human and the City for Social Research (HCSR) shows that most of the beaches in Ras El-Bar are leased, and that the sea has been blocked along 43.9% of the total 4.56 kilometers of shoreline.
Whose Ras El-Bar?
Even so, the cafeterias are not the only reason the sea is closed off to beachgoers. There are the closed beaches — the Armed Forces beach, Nakheel and Khaleeg — which admit vacationers by ticket, up to 150 pounds a head. And there are now three private beaches tied to investments in which the state itself takes part: Steigenberger, Arkan and Doray Bay.
The first belongs to the international hotel chain, which seven years ago occupied the most distinguished site in the city as the first five-star hotel in the central Delta, and was opened by the president himself in 2019.
The Holding Company for Tourism and Hotels obtained the site on a 49-year usufruct and handed management to Steigenberger, which said at the opening that the hotel was aimed at “the upper end of the market.”
In September 2020 the holding company opened the hotel's beach area, after developing it at a cost of ten million pounds, to serve guests as a private beach that also allows visitors who are not from the hotel's clientele. The state is working to open an annex to the Steigenberger El Lessan by 2027, to meet rising demand for high-end tourist accommodation in Ras El-Bar.
Arkan beach belongs to the hotel of the same name, also under the holding company, managed by Arkan for Hotel and Resort Management and carrying a price tag of 125 million pounds. It has not opened yet.
The third belongs to the luxury Doray Bay compound, owned by MBG, which runs a kilometer along the shore and has not opened either, though it began receiving visitors at an upscale restaurant and café in July.
Arkan and Doray Bay share a design: a wooden deck raised over the sand in front of the beach, with beams above it and lamps hanging down. It makes a different scene from the working-class beach cafés, with their old wooden barriers and their plastic chairs stacked in front, and a much closer one to the private beaches and luxury resorts of the North Coast.
Doray Bay above all is what the new Ras El-Bar looks like. Its effect goes beyond a private beach, since it is also a residential project, with units from 60 to 300 square meters, and the first step in the “invasion” of the working-class town by the upper segment of the population. They will not come to rent and stay a while, as at the Steigenberger and Arkan. They will come as owners.
The scale of the change is easier to picture if you remember that MBG's entire track record consists of luxury projects in the New Administrative Capital, and that the company announced in July an agreement with Hilton to build a 160-room hotel inside the compound, to strengthen its appeal to investors.
Mahmoud will leave the hut he has rented year after year on one of the familiar streets of Ras El-Bar, from 101st to 77th and 64th, down to the market and the Directorate beach, and go once his three nights are up. He will probably leave whatever is left of the electricity credit he bought sitting in the meter, hoping to come back next year. “We'll see. Maybe we'll come back for a day. Maybe two.”
(*) A pseudonym, at the source's request.