Bedouin Heritage Centre 18 Kilometres From Hurghada Trains 100 Guides and 80 Women in Desert Crafts
Maaza, the centre at El Radda village that won a 2026 responsible-tourism award for Africa, builds its desert offer around local tribe members: 100 young men trained in hospitality, guiding and storytelling, and 80 women in weaving, embroidery, palm-leaf work and leather, a tourism expert told Al-Masry Al-Youm.
18 October 2026
The Maaza Centre for Culture and Heritage, in El Radda village 18 kilometres from Hurghada, is built around training people from the local Bedouin community to run the visitor experience themselves, according to a report in Al-Masry Al-Youm.
The centre's programme includes training 100 young men in hospitality skills, tour guiding and the art of storytelling, the tourism expert Mahmoud Attia told the paper. A second strand trains 80 women in handicrafts — weaving, embroidery, products made from palm leaves, and leatherwork — and the centre provides a space where their work can be shown and sold.
Attia described the project's premise as treating members of the tribe as the people who actually hold the knowledge of local heritage, rather than as helpers in a service operation: the visitor's experience is meant to come from them, through customs, folk stories and everyday practices, alongside the crafts and the skills tied to desert life.
The point, as the report sets it out, is to give desert trips out of Hurghada a cultural dimension beyond the drive and the dunes — hospitality, ways of adapting to the desert, and the people who live there. According to the information published about the project, its buildings use natural materials from the surrounding desert so that the site keeps its Bedouin character.
Essam Ali, another tourism expert quoted by the paper, said this kind of offer matters more as destinations compete and as cities that live on beach and sea tourism look for cultural and environmental experiences that draw different kinds of visitors. The Red Sea's range — from reefs and beaches to mountains, valleys and open desert — comes with ways of living that he argued are worth documenting and protecting.
The centre won the Responsible Tourism Award for Africa for 2026, according to the project's own information; we reported that award on 16 October. Al-Masry Al-Youm's report does not give opening hours, prices or any way to book, and does not say how far the two training programmes have progressed.