AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Cave of Swimmers is one of the most celebrated rock art sites in the Sahara, a shallow sandstone shelter on the remote Gilf Kebir plateau in Egypt's Western Desert where Neolithic painters created haunting human figures — some appearing to swim through the air — roughly 9,000 to 6,000 years ago, when the region was a grassy landscape teeming with life.↗↗
Discovered in October 1933 by Hungarian explorer László Almásy, the cave became world-famous as a key location in The English Patient. Today it remains one of the Sahara's most evocative prehistoric galleries, drawing intrepid travelers who cross extraordinary distances to stand where Stone Age artists once worked.↗↗
A Gallery from a Green Sahara
The Cave of Swimmers sits in Wadi Sura — a name loosely translated as the Valley of Pictures because of the extraordinary density of rock art in this area — on the western edge of the Gilf Kebir plateau in Egypt's New Valley Governorate, near the border with Libya. The plateau itself means Great Barrier and rises nearly a thousand feet above the surrounding desert, its vast sandstone expanse roughly the size of Switzerland. So remote was this landscape that its existence only became known to European cartographers in the 1920s.
