El Quseir Shipped Egypt's First Phosphate in 1916, and the Italian Colony and Cemetery Are Still There

El Quseir, the Red Sea town between Safaga and Marsa Alam, was the place Egypt's phosphate industry began — and the physical traces of it are still standing in and around the town.

According to a feature published by the Egyptian daily Youm7, the turning point came in 1912, when an Italian mining mission arrived in El Quseir after the Egyptian-Italian Phosphate Company was founded with funding from the Bank of Rome. Prospecting and extraction then began on a large scale in the mountains around the town.

Mohamed Abu El-Wafa, director of archaeological awareness at the Red Sea antiquities department, told the paper that the old port of El Quseir saw a landmark moment in 1916, when the ship "Kafy" sailed out loaded with the first consignment of Egyptian phosphate bound for India — the first export of phosphate from Egypt to a foreign market.

The ore was moved to the quayside by the most modern means then available, he said: the company used cableway networks and railways to bring it down from the mountain mines to the sea port. Thousands of workers, technicians and administrators were employed in the mines and production sites, and El Quseir became one of the leading centres of phosphate production and export in the Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century. The Egyptian workforce came from across the country, and particularly from the governorates of Upper Egypt.

The quarter the Italians called "the Colony"

Large numbers of Italians settled in the town during those years and built a complete quarter of their own, known as al-Mustaamara — "the Colony". It contained the trades and services its residents needed, with doctors, teachers, bakers, barbers and other craftsmen working there, forming a self-contained community tied directly to the mining industry.

The Italians stayed in phosphate extraction and export for more than five decades. The best-known thing they left behind is the Italian cemetery in El Quseir, which holds the remains of 24 Italian managers and workers along with a child. A large marble plaque there records their names and their dates of birth and death.

Wasfi Tamir, a resident of El Quseir who follows the town's heritage, said the graves were built in a simple and distinctive way, using vertical and horizontal stone slabs pointed at the top rather than the costly conventional stone tombs. He added that two Italian families later moved their relatives' remains back to Italy on a private plane, and that the empty transport crates stood beside the graves for some time afterwards — something the town still remembers.

A royal order to wall the graves

In 1926, during a visit by King Fuad I to El Quseir to open the Gebel Duwi mine, the king ordered a wall to be built around the Italian cemetery to protect and preserve it as part of the town's history. Later widening of the main road took away part of the cemetery's area, but it is still there.

El Quseir is one of the oldest towns on the Red Sea, the feature notes, and has passed through successive civilisations from the pharaonic period to the present day. Its historic port was a crossing point for trade and for pilgrims heading to the Holy Land, before the town became the first place in Egypt to see phosphate mined on a large scale. The remains of the mines, the old port, the Italian colony and the historic cemetery are what is left of that century of mining and shipping.