Ras Mohammed

Declared in 1983, it was Egypt's first marine national park and protects the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, where the Gulf of Aqaba and the Gulf of Suez meet to form part of the Red Sea. Its vertical coral walls, which drop sheer from the surface to several hundred metres only a few paces from the shore, are reckoned among the finest dive sites on the planet, with an extraordinary marine biodiversity helped by how little freshwater sediment reaches the region — which keeps the water exceptionally clear all year round.