All I knew about Aswan before I visited Egypt was that it had a dam, and that much is certainly true. But there is so much else there to discover that by the time we left, my husband and I had decided it was our favorite Egyptian city.
The Aswan High Dam is without doubt the place to begin exploring, since its construction has had such an impact on local life and culture. Our guide, Sameh Samir, remembers when his father was one of the 30,000 engineers and other workers on the round-the-clock operation that lasted for 11 years.
Made up of 17 times more granite than was used in the Great Pyramid, it is the largest embankment dam in the world. It created Lake Nasser—one of the largest lakes in the world—which extends into Sudan, where it is known as Lake Nubia.
When the dam opened in 1970, it provided water for irrigation, controlled flooding, improved traffic on the Nile, and doubled the amount of electricity available to Egyptians—but at a price. Where the lake was created had once been the ancestral home of the Nubians, who now had to be relocated.
