Suez Canal Holidays

Located west of the Sinai Peninsular, the Suez Canal is a large artificial maritime canal connecting the Mediterranean at Port Said with the Red Sea at Suez. A feat of nineteenth-century engineering, at 163 km long and 300 m wide at its narrowest point, the canal allows two-way north-to-south maritime transportation, most importantly between Europe and Asia without circumnavigation of Africa. Before it’s opening in 1869, goods were sometimes offloaded from ships and carried overland between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

The canal comprises two parts, north and south of the Great Bitter Lake, linking the Mediterranean Sea to the Gulf of Suez on the Red Sea. The canal has no locks because the terrain through which it passes is flat, and sea level at both ends is the same.

The canal allows the passage of ships of up to some 150,000 tons displacement, with cargo. It permits ships of up to 16 m draft to pass, and improvements are planned to increase this to 22 m by 2010 thus allowing supertankers passage. The passage through the canal takes between 11 and 16 hours at a speed of around 8 knots. The low speed helps prevent erosion of the canal banks by ship's wakes. The canal averages about 8% of the world shipping traffic. In 2005, more than 18,000 vessels passed through the canal.