Quseir Old Port — Ottoman pilgrim harbour and the buried Roman port of Myos Hormos.

What you are looking at

The Quseir Old Port is the historical harbour at the seaward end of the Wadi el-Hammamat trade route, four hundred metres north of the modern town centre. It sits on the same coastal bay used as a port for two thousand years: the Romans built a harbour here, calling it Myos Hormos, which functioned from approximately the late first century BC through the late Roman period as one of the two main Egyptian Red Sea ports for the trade with India and the Horn of Africa. The Roman harbour silted up in the late antique period; the Islamic-period settlement moved a short distance south, and in the 16th century the Ottomans built a fortress on the seafront to control the new harbour that took shape around it. From the 17th through the late 19th century the Quseir port handled Hajj pilgrim traffic from Upper Egypt — pilgrims travelling overland from the Nile via the Hammamat road, then sailing across the Red Sea to Jeddah for the onward journey to Mecca.

The visible monuments today are: the Sultan Selim fortress (built 1517 under Selim I, restored in stages between 1996 and 2008 by the Polish-Egyptian conservation programme), now operating as a small museum; the restored 19th-century customs buildings immediately north of the fortress, which house a second museum display on the Hajj trade and the Egyptian-Red-Sea pearl industry; and the buried Roman site of Quseir el-Qadim ("Old Quseir"), eight kilometres north of the modern town, where the British excavations of the 1980s and the more recent University of Southampton work have exposed warehouse blocks, residential quarters and the harbour itself. Quseir el-Qadim is not on the standard visitor route — you can walk to the site, but the exposed remains have been re-buried for conservation since 2014.

On the ground

Opening hours: 09:00–14:00 Tuesday to Sunday in the summer schedule (closed Monday all day); 09:00–13:00 and 17:00–20:00 in the autumn-winter schedule from mid-October. The combined ticket for the fortress and the customs museum was EGP 100 for foreign adult visitors at the last verification (22 May 2026); the student ticket was EGP 50; the Egyptian national ticket was EGP 10. The photography permit is EGP 30 and covers both buildings.

The site is at walking distance from the modern Quseir town centre — approximately 350 metres north of the main bus station, on the seafront road. The Saqalan office at 34 Al-Mina Street is a short walk further north; visitors combining the museum with an office appointment can do both in a morning.

Quseir el-Qadim (the Roman site) is eight kilometres north on the coastal highway. There is no museum and no formal access; the surface remains are visible on a walk through the sand. If you have a vehicle the visit takes thirty minutes; on foot, allow a full half-day for the round trip from town.

Reading list

• Peacock, D.P.S. and Blue, L. Myos Hormos – Quseir al-Qadim: Roman and Islamic Ports on the Red Sea. Two volumes, Oxbow, 2006 and 2011.
• Le Quesne, C. Quseir: An Ottoman and Napoleonic Fortress on the Red Sea Coast of Egypt. American University in Cairo Press, 2007. Definitive treatment of the Sultan Selim fortress.
• Bruyère, B. Rapport sur les fouilles de Deir el-Médineh. Various volumes from 1924 — for the Pharaonic-period context of the Coptos exit of the Hammamat route.
• Saqalan field notebooks 2014–2026, "QP" tag in the subscriber archive.