Saint Catherine Area: Visitor and Heritage Guide

Saint Catherine is in the mountains of South Sinai, on the road between St Catherine and Nuweibaa. Conditions in Sinai change, so check access locally before planning a visit.

What UNESCO inscribed

The Saint Catherine Area went onto the World Heritage List in 2002, and the property is 60,100 hectares. That figure is the first useful thing about it: the inscription is a mountain landscape with a monastery in it, not a building with a parking lot.

The Orthodox monastery stands at the foot of the mountain the Old Testament calls Horeb, where Moses is recorded as receiving the Tablets of the Law, and which Muslims know and revere as Jebel Musa. UNESCO states the consequence directly: the entire area is sacred to three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Very few places on the World Heritage List carry that sentence.

The monastery was founded in the sixth century and is the oldest Christian monastery still in use for the purpose it was built for. Its Byzantine walls enclose buildings that matter to the study of Byzantine architecture, and it holds collections of early Christian manuscripts and icons that UNESCO calls outstanding.

The mountain itself

The ascent is part of the inscription rather than an add-on to it. The Path of Moses, Sikket Sayidna Musa, climbs to the summit past two arches, the Gate of Stephen and the Gate of the Law, and the remains of chapels along the way. The Holy Summit is an archaeological site in its own right, and it carries both a mosque and a chapel, which is the whole point of the place expressed in two small buildings.

UNESCO leans on the siting when it explains why this is inscribed at all: the monastery represents a deliberate attempt to bind natural beauty and remoteness on one side to human spiritual commitment on the other. That is why a photograph of the walls alone misses it, and why the picture at the top of this page is mostly mountain.