What it actually takes to live in Sahel year-round, according to the people doing it

🏠🌊 Years ago, the idea of living year-round in Sahel would have been laughable. The North Coast has — for years — justifiably remained an exclusively summer destination. The conversation has changed as of late, and year-round living on the Mediterranean stretch is no longer a far-fetched notion. In 2025, developers and government officials made the case: desalination plants coming online, schools in the licensing pipeline, healthcare services beginning to take shape, retail chains setting up shop past September. A year later, we wanted to know how much of that promise actually turned into reality.

EnterpriseAM spoke to two residents who now call Sahel home year-round to ask what life looks like for them on a day-to-day basis, how they cope off-season, and what challenges remain.

Year-round in Marassi

“We wouldn’t change what we’re doing or where we live for anything.” Dr. Maha Blakeway (LinkedIn) has lived on the North Coast full-time, year-round, since 2018 — long before most areas of the coast as we know it today had names attached to them. A naturopathic and functional med doctor who runs an online practice specializing gut health and the microbiome, Blakeway tells EnterpriseAM she and her husband, Christopher Blakeway — who helped build the Bibliotheca Alexandrina — had spent more than 20 years in London before deciding to retire by the sea. Egyptian-British herself and originally from Alexandria, she says the decision to settle in Marassi rather than Cairo or Alexandria was deliberate: “We’d always intended to retire by the sea. We knew that wasn’t easy, we knew that was going to be challenging, but we were up for the challenge.”

The early years meant building a supply chain from scratch. When the Blakeways moved in 2018, Marassi had little beyond basic groceries, Blakeway says. Her husband commuted to Alexandria twice a week for his work at the library and would bring back a week's worth of shopping; she supplemented with what she could find in nearby Sidi Abdel Rahman, though she found the quality inconsistent for her dietary standards as a nutritionist. The one disruption to that routine came from an unlikely source: Covid-19. “There was more food being delivered during Covid to Sahel than at any other time,” she notes — a surge in year-round residents briefly making the market worth serving, before demand collapsed again once the pandemic eased and people returned to the cities.

She says the supply picture has changed meaningfully in the last three years — and credits it to a specific development. The Ras El Hekma-adjacent Dabaa nuclear project has brought a sizable Russian population to the area, Blakeway says, which has in turn supported a year-round supermarket roughly 10 minutes from her home. It’s a direct example, in her account, of a pattern she thinks holds across the coast: infrastructure follows population, not the other way around. “Where there is a population of people — enough people to serve — people will serve you,” she says.

“Oh yes, 100%,” Blakeway says when asked whether she has sufficient access to healthcare and other amenities. “For emergencies, there’s the El Alamein Hospital, which is, again, 15 minutes from us. And we’ve had a few incidents where we’ve had to go. And actually, now in Marassi, we have an all year-round emergency hospital as of now. My husband had a cut on his forehead last year, and we were there in two minutes.” Asked whether the Marassi facility serves North Coast residents generally or only those inside the compound, she adds: “I believe it is open to everyone. It’s obviously an emergency hospital, so they won’t deny someone who needs medical help.”

On entertainment, Blakeway is careful to draw a line around what she’s actually describing. “Where we’re lucky in Marassi — but I will exclusively speak about Marassi, obviously — so we have an all-year-round 18-hole golf course, so my husband plays golf,” she says. “We have hotels, so if you want to have a nice dining experience with entertainment as well, we go to one of those hotels twice a week for dinners.” Beyond the compound gates, though: “I don’t believe there are any amenities out there.”

…And there’s one more thing that makes year-round living much easier for the Blakeways: “In Sidi Abdel Rahman, opposite, there are now governmental offices. If you want to renew your ID, that’s literally across the road, and that’s all year-round,” she says. “There’s the National Bank and other banks open all year-round in Sidi Abdel Rahman. There’s tailors, there’s upholstery, there’s dry cleaners — there’s everything, actually, across the road.”

There is, however, a dead period. “During February — sort of mid-January to mid-March — it’s a very down time. There’s almost no one around other than the Russian population that’s here. And it gets very cold. Not colder than Europe, but similar,” she says. “That can get you down.”

On whether the coast could absorb a doubling of its year-round population, Blakeway is skeptical: “If we're going to be realistic and honest, it will never turn into Cairo or Alexandria, for two reasons. At the moment, there are no schools — good quality schools. There are no international schools, so that’s the first obstacle,” she says.

Physical infrastructure, by contrast, she considers already proven: “I think the infrastructure is built to sustain the number of units that are there, because in August, they’re all open — these units — and the infrastructure manages. That shouldn't be a problem, I think, as far as infrastructure is concerned.”

Eight years in, Blakeway says she has no regrets — and no shortage of alternatives. “We’re in the steering wheel, we’re in control,” she says. She and her husband maintain a home in Alexandria and hold British passports that would let them return to London at any point, but “there’s nowhere in the world that would attract us to move to."

Studying in Alamein

Jannah Ahmed is a third-year medical student at the College of Medicine at AASTMT El Alamein, living on the coast — also in Marassi — for the past three years. She’d been staying in Canada and made the move to the North Coast when a family friend who teaches at the university recommended the area.

Her first impressions? Great. “Calm, peaceful, quiet — I really enjoyed it as soon as I moved here,” she tells EnterpriseAM. She credits a tight-knight community of retirees who live on the coast year-round for making the off-season manageable. Most of her medical school peers live in Marassi and nearby compounds, including Porto Golf; others commute daily from Alexandria — which takes “around 90 minutes,” according to Ahmed.

On what’s open off-season, Ahmed’s account differs from Blakeway’s: “Not much,” she says. It took a couple of months for Ahmed to settle in, initially finding it difficult to stock up. She would also frequent Alexandria, as well as Sidi Abdel Rahman and Alamein for her daily needs — which she pointed are “not the best places to go as a woman alone” in the off-season, but notes that security isn’t an issue within the compound.

Healthcare is where Blakeway and Ahmed differ. Where Blakeway described a two-minute wait and a clean suture for her husband’s cut at Marassi’s hospital, Ahmed describes a near catastrophe at the same facility following a car accident. “My eyeball was essentially out of my face — the car flipped over,” she says. “I went to the Marassi Hospital, and there was little they could do.” Ahmed had to be driven to Alexandria instead, where she underwent surgery. “I don’t think anyone would have this extreme case of a big accident during the off-season,” she adds, offering an explanation as to why the facility may have been unprepared.

Getting around requires a car, but ride-hailing has closed part of the gap: Ahmed says InDrive runs through the off-season. E-commerce has also improved — Amazon delivers next-day, down from over a week when she first moved. When asked what’s needed for the North Coast to support year-round living, Ahmed just names proper healthcare and “one or two” restaurants that open year-round. According to the third-year medical student, there’s already a large enough population to support these businesses — including expats working in the Dabaa project.

The common threads

Two women, one community — together they sketch a version of year-round Sahel that’s more livable than its reputation, but less finished than what’s being marketed. Groceries, healthcare, ride-hailing, and government paperwork all exist in some form; whether they’re reliable enough to build a life around still depends heavily on who’s asking (and what it is exactly that they need). Despite commonalities, both women noted starkly different experiences even when discussing the same things. But both prove that life, year-round, is indeed possible on Egypt’s northernmost coasts.