St Catherine monastery
St Catherine monastery is in the Sinai peninsula in Egypt at an elevation of about 1600 meters from sea level, at the foot of the Sinai High Mountains.
Up to a thousand visitors come to visit St. Katherine’s Monastery, the oldest continuously inhabited monastery in the World built on the site where Moses (Prophet Musa) talked to God in the miracle of the Burning Bush, and to climb Mt. Sinai (the Biblical Mt. Horeb, known locally as Jebel Musa) where Moses has received the Ten Commandments.
Most visitors to St Catherine monastery arrive on organized coach tours from the Red Sea resorts of Sharm el Sheikh, Taba and Dahab in the evening, have dinner and maybe a couple of hours sleep in a hotel, climb the mountain at dawn, visit the Monastery in the morning and return to the resort.
St. Catherine and Mt. Sinai can be visited independently as well, avoiding the busy times on the mountain and discovering the rest of what this unique region offers.
If you want your all inclusive holidays to Egypt to be a truly memorable religious experience then we suggest that you do not miss out visiting the city of St. Katherine which is an important destination for the three major religions in the Sinai area: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
If you are a practitioner or a devout follower of any of these three religions, then a pilgrimage to the area might be a good idea as there are literally hundreds of important religious sites which are found throughout the city of St. Katherine that you can visit.
St Catherine monastery (St. Catherine’s City),
the Center of the Sinai High Mountain Region The region is a UNESCO World Heritage Area for its natural and cultural importance, and in fact, you could spend weeks to explore it.
There are over 200 religious places and other important monasteries and churches, ruins of Byzantine monastic settlements, the highest mountains in Egypt with spectacular views, amazing rock formations and landscape.
It is a unique high-altitude desert eco-system with many endemic and rare species, there is a whole range of medicinal plants used by locals for centuries which are not found elsewhere, there are water-pools, springs, creeks, narrow canyons and wide valleys.
In the valleys of the high mountains, called wadis, everywhere you go there are beautiful Bedouin gardens unique to this area only.
Its original inhabitants, the kind and friendly Jebeliya (Gebeliya) Bedouin are expert gardeners and camel herders, and if you take your time you might have a glimpse into their closed, traditional, albeit slowly changing way of life and culture that has been around for more than 1400 years.
For visitors, this site contains practical and background information about the city, the region and its people.
For local businesses, projects and the community in general, it provides a web-presence: all listings are free, but entries must be related to the.
