Chief Executive Officer of Somabay, Ibrahim El Missiri was Nile FM's guest on "The Big Breakfast Show" where he discusses how Somabay has recently been on the radar hosting many major events such as the PR Narrative Summit, Solasi Wellbeing Festival, international sports competitions, beauty pageants, and how it has become a strong and viable touristic destination in Egypt.
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The Uniqueness of Somabay&rsquo;s Location
Mr. El Missiri started with a description of Somabay and how it is such a unique project in terms of location, &ldquo;Somabay is basically located in the Red Sea, so it&rsquo;s half an hour south of Hurghada. What people don&rsquo;t know is it&rsquo;s a peninsula. So we&rsquo;re actually 7 KM offshore from mainland Egypt. We&rsquo;ve got this beautiful 14 KM coastline&hellip; surrounded by the sea nearly 360 degrees and it&rsquo;s probably got the longest continuous sandy beach on the Red Sea. The Red Sea is all coral so there are no sandy beaches for swimming like the north coast, but we&rsquo;ve got that. 5 and a half KM stretch of sandy beaches and then, in the end, we&rsquo;ve got a world-class dive site&hellip; [and] a 7 KM reef, which is amazing.&rdquo;
The Variety of Outdoor Activities in Somabay
Mr. El Missiri highlighted how Somabay is keen on offering numerous fun activities for its residents, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s basically a fully integrated destination so it started off as basically a few hotels scattered on this peninsula. And we&rsquo;ve got an incredible&hellip; championship golf course. I think it&rsquo;s ranked in the top 10 in Africa. We have a beautiful marina. There&rsquo;s an incredible kite surfing site... ranked from the top 5 in the world. The Suez Canal corridor is basically a wind tunnel and because we&rsquo;re sticking out in the middle of the sea, that wind comes very strong, but because of the bay, we&rsquo;ve got a flat surface.&rdquo;
&nbsp;<iframe title="Somabay New Golf Course Inspirations" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5l9PTphGnac" width="1904" height="768" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
&ldquo;The cool thing about Soma is because we&rsquo;re so far out into the sea it&rsquo;s quite different, we&rsquo;ve got a gigantic coral, and everything is sort of oversized. These are not the kind of reefs that you can see on the mainland. It&rsquo;s more pristine. We&rsquo;ve got turtle nesting sites. We get a visit every year around Jan/Feb from the whale sharks, which are amazing. You can drift if you go on the open sea side.&rdquo;
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How Somabay Started: Music and Sports
When Mr. El Missiri was asked about how Somabay as a project started, his response was that, &ldquo;Basically when we started thinking about it.. how do you create the place? It&rsquo;s all about the place making, so we started thinking about music. We started having all sorts of different concerts&hellip; Recently, we hosted the 2cellos, it was an incredible concert.&rdquo;
&nbsp;<iframe title="2 CELLOS IN SOMABAY" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/A2TQIKCbQPI" width="1904" height="768" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Mr. El Missiri added, &ldquo;[Music] is one angle. The other angle was basically sport. We started hosting all those different sporting events like the Triathlon, the Endurance Festival, and the tri factory. Most recently we had the World Aquatic Festival, which is for the first time in Egypt, we&rsquo;ve hosted 2 World Cups and a World Cup qualifier. We have beach water polo and luckily for us, the Egyptian team got second place, the first time in history. We&rsquo;re pretty keen on the sports angle and the music angle.&rdquo;
&nbsp;<iframe title="The World Aquatics Festival Somabay 2023" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pZxZ5eBfDDs" width="1904" height="768" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Somabay As The Home Residency Not Only The Destination
Somabay is more than just a destination, but you could also live there and join the growing number of home residents, Mr. El Missiri explained that &ldquo;This all started around 2014. In the beginning, we just had 22 homeowners, I think now we&rsquo;ve got over 1800. I think people want sort of a laid-back destination. Easy going. We don&rsquo;t really have a lot of chill destinations to put your flip flops on and walk down to the beach with your family or on your own to have a good time&hellip; because we&rsquo;ve got that incredible beach, we&rsquo;re so lucky&hellip; It sorts of brings the Sahel vibes to the Red Sea, but it&rsquo;s all year round.&rdquo;
<iframe title="Somabay - Taqa Arabia 5MW Solar Power Plant Opening Ceremony" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FGl-nYlqw-8" width="1904" height="768" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>&nbsp;
Sustainability
One of Somabay&rsquo;s most important values is saving the earth, Somabay makes sure everything is sustainable and environmental-friendly. Mr. El Missiri highlighted that &ldquo;The problem with all destinations is that they&rsquo;re not really sustainable. If the developer at some point stops investing things will just slowly collapse and what we wanted to do is how to make this survive the test of time so we looked at energy, we looked at actually changing the way we do things, how to manage waste and actually we&rsquo;ve even gone to changing the grass we use for the golf. So we&rsquo;ve sourced this grass from Miami which is basically seawater resistant so we can actually grow more grass but actually use less water. The other thing is basically converting all the energy that we could to solar energy which we&rsquo;ve done, the maximum is 18%.&rdquo;

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