Also known as The tile wreck
The one carrying Italian floor tiles, still stacked in the holds forty years later. The shallowest and most forgiving wreck at Abu Nuhas, and the one novice wreck divers should meet first.
She was built in Germany in 1954 and had been through several names before ending up Greek-registered and carrying a cargo of Italian floor tiles from Livorno to Jeddah.
On 31 August 1981 she hit Abu Nuhas at full speed with, by most accounts, the captain asleep and the reef showing on nobody’s watch. The bow crumpled into the reef and stayed there; the crew were taken off without loss.
There is a long-running argument in Red Sea diving about which wreck at Abu Nuhas is which, and the Chrisoula K sits at the centre of it — some sources hold that the bow section belongs to another ship, the Marcus, entirely. The tiles are not in dispute, and neither is the diving.
Yes, particularly as a first wreck. Nobody would cross a continent for it, but as the second or third dive of an Abu Nuhas day it earns its place.
This is planning and history, not a dive briefing. Conditions change; your guide on the day is the authority. Diving emergency numbers and the coast’s recompression chambers are on our emergency contacts page.
Two pinnacles north-east of Giftun with a dramatic drop-off, long known for moray eels and for currents that decide the dive plan.
A shallow reef at the mouth of the Gulf of Suez that has claimed at least four ships — the Giannis D, Carnatic, Chrisoula K and Kimon M — all divable in a day.
A British armed merchant ship sunk by air attack in 1941, still holding its wartime cargo of motorcycles, trucks and rifles. Widely considered one of the best wreck dives in the world.
Hurghada’s house reefs: a cluster of sheltered sites in a protected area, where most of the coast’s divers make their first Red Sea dive.
A British war freighter still loaded with the equipment of an army that never received it — motorcycles, trucks, rifles and two railway locomotives — and the best-known wreck dive in the world outside Truk Lagoon.
The most photographed wreck at Abu Nuhas, and the most disorienting: the whole stern section lies canted hard over, so every corridor inside it runs at an angle your inner ear refuses to accept.
A Victorian P&O steamer that has been on the reef since 1869, so thoroughly colonised that her ribs now read as architecture rather than as a ship. The oldest wreck dived on this coast.
Carrying lentils from Turkey to India when she hit the reef in 1978. The deepest and least visited of the Abu Nuhas wrecks, because she sits where the weather does.
The Thistlegorm’s forgotten sister in the same story: bombed by the same squadron two nights later, sunk in the same anchorage, and left almost perfectly intact in 50m — which is why almost nobody sees her.
Hurghada’s standard day trip, and for good reason: proper coral gardens in a protected area, 45 minutes out of the marina.
The town guide for Hurghada