St. Catherines Tours

Saint Catherine is the capital city of Saint Katherine Markaz and a natural protectorate in the South Sinai Governorate in Sinai in Egypt. It is located at the outskirts of El-Tur Mountains Province at an elevation of 1586 m, 110 km away from Nuweiba, at the foot of Mount Sinai and the Saint Catherine's Monastery and boasts a population of 4,603.  Saint Catherine's Monastery lies on the Sinai Peninsula, at the mouth of a gorge at the foot of Mount Sinai in the city of Saint Catherine in Egypt. The monastery is Orthodox and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. According to the UNESCO report, this monastery is one of the oldest working Christian monasteries in the world together with the Monastery of Saint Anthony, situated across the Red Sea in the desert south of Cairo, which also lays claim to that title.

The oldest record of monastic life at Sinai comes from the travel journal written in Latin by a woman named Egeria about 381-384. She visited many places around the Holy Land and Mount Sinai, where, according to the Hebrew Bible, Moses received the Ten Commandments from God.  The monastery possesses copies of an important historical document, the Achtiname, in which Muhammad is claimed to have bestowed his protection upon the monastery.