The Pyramids project
Sir: I have just read the article by Desmond Stewart headlined 'Hollis in the evening' in your issue of 3 June, which referred to the cancellation of the Pyramids Oasis project. Had the project simply been a golf course' and villas for wealthy Arabs and foreigners surrounding it, I believe the criticisms and the assumptions made by Desmond Stewart would have been largely justified. In fact it seems he has simply listened to the criticisms of those who have been attacking us, mostly for political reasons, in the course of the past year. The facts are very different. In the first place the Pyramids Oasis project was planned as a residential resort which would substantially help to alleviate two of Egypt's most pressing problems. The first was the provision of adadequate tourist facilities in the Pyramids area which would help encourage visitors to stay in .Egypt longer. The average stay of a visitor to Egypt has declined from an average of nineteen days in 1950 to less than six days today. This has been.almost entirely because of the
lack of suitable facilities and accommodation for the discerning tourist market. The other need that it was designed to alleviate was the desperate housing shortage in Cairo for Cairenes. The Pyramids Oasis project was to have had nineteen villages with accommodation for 30,000 Cairenes who would have commuted to work in Cairo every day. The central core of the project was to include four major international class hotels, sports club, business centre, a tourist village, and was designed to provide all categories of tourists with exactly the facilities they wanted.
The article seems to suggest that the decision to do the project in 1974 was one made on the spur of the moment by the President. In fact what was originally taken was a decision in principle and three years of intensive work then ensued with the plans being submitted to every relevant government agency who examined every detail of the scheme in the most minute detail. The contract for the work to start on the infrastructure was in fact only signed after the final approvals had been given in the summer of 1977.
I feel sure that you will appreciate that this actually gives a very different picture of what the Pyramids Oasis was all about. Whilst sympathising with President Sadat's own internal problems and understanding his reasons for cancelling the project, I am sure that it will be realised in future that the cancellation of the project was a major loss to Egypt.
David Wynne-Morgan Southern Pacific Properties (UK) Limited, 127 Sloane Street, London SW1
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