End of the World Cinema

An abandoned open-air cinema in the Sinai desert, rows of seats facing a screen that never showed a film.

The End of the World Cinema is exactly that: a sandy plain in the middle of nowhere, with several hundred theatre seats arranged in rows facing a large white screen. The screen still stands. The seats are bolted down, slowly weathering. Nothing has ever been shown here. The whole installation sits about 30 km north of the town of Nuweiba and has become an unlikely fixture on the off-road Sinai tourism circuit.

There is no signage, no entry fee, and effectively no other people. Most desert-trip operators in Sharm can include it in a longer 4x4 tour, usually combined with the Coloured Canyon or the Blue Desert. Visitors take their photographs and leave — it is hard to spend more than fifteen minutes here, but those fifteen minutes are memorable.

things to do sight
A story
The project was the work of a French entrepreneur in the 1990s who imagined a luxury experience for European film stars: outdoor cinema on a desert plain, with helicopter transfers and a generator big enough to power the screen. The opening was a fiasco — the generator never worked — and the project was abandoned at once. The chairs and screen have stood untouched since.