Western Desert, Egypt
Adrère Amellal
The White Mountain
29°12′N 25°31′E
Siwa Oasis
Thirty eight rooms
This place did not go off the grid.
The grid never came.
No one cut a wire here to make a point about modern life. There was never a wire. Sixty million year old rock, two natural springs, and thirty eight rooms cut by hand out of the ground they stand on.
The White Mountain
Adrère Amellal was built in 2000 at the foot of rock sixty million years old, by Siwan hands, using the only method this part of the desert has ever used. Karshef: rock salt, clay, stone and palm, cut and shaped without machinery.
Nothing was imported to make it look like it belongs. The walls came out of the ground they stand on, and they will go back into it.
The number of rooms is set by what the natural springs can carry. Not by demand, not by a projection, not by a decision anyone made in a room. Thirty eight, and that is the ceiling.
No line to the grid
There is no electricity. No wifi. No socket, no switch, no screen anywhere in the building.
At dusk someone walks the paths with a torch and lights what needs lighting. Beeswax candles go into the rooms. After that, sight belongs to fire, moonlight, and whatever the stars happen to be doing.
Without a screen to default to, the eyes begin registering what they had stopped noticing. Nothing was added here. Nothing is competing for attention any more.
The purpose of Adrère Amellal is to offer a journey into the past, where man lives in harmony with nature in a unique and hospitable environment.
Sustainability lies at the core of Adrère's existence. Its operation relies on two natural springs, while the local community delivers practically most, if not all, of its hospitality services, without dependence on electricity, in a candle-lit environment.
Adrère is integrated in the natural environment of Siwa. It makes nature the real host, and engages the local community in service provision.
Dr. Mounir Neamatalla · Founder, Adrère Amellal
The garden and the table
Behind the lodge, natural springs irrigate a garden that has fed the kitchen since the place was built. What arrives at the table was in the ground that morning. Herbs picked by hand. Vegetables and salads with no distance at all between where they grew and where they are eaten.
Traditional dishes cook slowly in honey glazed clay pots, the kind used in this region for longer than anyone has been counting. There is no menu written to impress anybody. Just what was ready, prepared the way it has always been prepared here.
The spring pool · Henrico Constantini
Water, salt, sand
A basin fed by the lodge's own springs, cool and clear, set into the rock. Beyond it, Siwa's salt lake, still enough to hold the whole sky on its surface. Further out, the Great Sand Sea opens into dunes with no fixed edge.
A walk through the old fortress of Shali puts you inside a settlement that was left to the weather generations ago and never rebuilt.
Salt, mud and massage treatments draw on what the land already provides. None of it is a programme. It is closer to what the desert does to a body that stays in it long enough to stop resisting the heat, the silence, and the slowness.
The room
Every room is different, because every room was cut by hand. Rock salt walls that hold the cool right through the afternoon. Palm wood ceilings. Floors of hand cut stone. Furniture shaped by artisans who learned the craft here, not ordered from a catalogue.
No two are alike, because no two were built alike.
Rock salt, palm wood, hand cut stone · Nancy Kingham
- Rooms
- Thirty eight
- Composition
- 5 single · 17 double · 10 desert · 6 suite
- Built
- 2000, karshef
- Electricity
- None
- Wifi and signal
- None
- Light after dark
- Beeswax, torch, moon
- Water
- Two natural springs
- From Siwa town
- Sixteen kilometres
Thirty eight rooms is the whole of it, and the springs decide that number, not us.
Ask about dates →Getting there
Siwa is not convenient, and that is most of the point. The oasis sits deep in Egypt's Western Desert near the Libyan border, and the lodge is a further sixteen kilometres out from the village. Getting here takes a full day and some intent. Very few people make the trip, which is exactly why it still feels the way it does.
On the second night, you stop listening for anything.
The grid still has not reached Siwa. Thirty eight rooms, sixteen kilometres past the village, for as long as that holds.
Plan your stay
Send us a note, and we'll pass it directly to Adrère Amellal.