EGYPT: Egypt increases security and upgrades facilities for tourists visiting Pyramids site

Record ID: 644625

  • Title: EGYPT: Egypt increases security and upgrades facilities for tourists visiting Pyramids site
  • Date: 11th August 2008
  • Summary: GREAT PYRAMID
  • Embargoed: 26th August 2008 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Egypt
  • Country: Egypt
  • Topics: Lifestyle,Travel / Tourism
  • Reuters ID: LVAA8A92C46XGL7IFDKFS1IQTY4Y
  • Story Text: For the legions of tourists who visit the last of the world's seven wonders in Giza every year, the experience is often filled with headaches as much as it is with wonder.
    Harangued by souvenir salesmen and stranded high atop the Giza plateau with no access to restrooms or cafeterias, many visitors leave the ancient site with vivid memories the trip's hassles as of the majestic pyramids and sphinx.
    To improve its image and better its services to visitors, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities has launched a renovation project in the historical site, employing modernized security measures and widening its facilities for tourists.
    On Monday (August 11), the completion of the first round of renovations on the Giza plateau was marked in a ceremony followed by a tour for the media, which introduced a new ticketing system, parking facilities, restrooms and tighter security measures.
    For individual tourists who have had to grapple with the site's chaotic administration, and buy tickets from a single weather-beaten kiosk on a steep road leading to the pyramids site which forced those without a car to hire a horse or a camel, sometimes in an extraordinary rate, are now facing a spacious entrance zone with manned ticket booths by a wide parking lot.
    The head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, Dr. Zahi Hawass, who inaugurated the renovations with Egypt's Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, said chaos and frustration will be a thing of the past.
    "Today we are announcing for the first time that the mystery and beauty of the pyramids will begin for the first time, because we have finished the first stage of the project which is to protect this historical site with an 18 kilometre fence in order to control entry to the pyramid area in addition to organizing the entrance to the Mina House," said Hawass.
    "At the same time we are beginning the second stage, as of today, to change the streets and the lighting, organize Sphinx square and to build administrative offices beneath the plateau. And, at the same time, the third stage has begun, so that all tourists will enter from the Fayoum plateau, and the horses and camels will be on the south side, and anyone who rides a camel will have the pyramids as a 'background' and then they will enter a visitors centre and take an electric car to visit the pyramids area. And I believe that this project will finally, after I always used to call the pyramid area a zoo, will become a historical site, and everyone who visits it will feel the mystery and greatness when he visits the great pyramids," he said.
    One of the biggest changes introduced today was the new security conduct.
    While visitors could once walk straight up the plateau to the pyramids and sphinx, a fence has gradually cut the city below from the site.
    The entire complex is now surrounded by a four-meter high fence, stretching along 18.5 kilometres around the site. The fence is transparent, to comply with UNESCO regulations, and is being monitored by nearly 200 video cameras from a modernized security control room, located near the site's entrance.
    "The fence that was built is the basic guarantee for controlling the entrance of anyone to this historical site. There won't be any more antiquities thieves, like there were at sites where from which antiquities were stolen before. There will be tickets for people who enter, and camels and horses will not be able enter, and therefore, for the first time, the police are able to control anyone entering or leaving the area," said Hawass.
    In the control room, security guards monitor 199 closed-circuit cameras shown on 35 monitors. Motion sensors installed in the security fence also help to track potential intruders.
    In its later stages, the project will see tourists being shuttled to the historical sites in electric carts, souvenir salesmen organized in a souk and horses and camels offer tourists rides kept in supervised stables.
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