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The Suez Canal (Qanâ el Suweis), west of the Sinai Peninsula, forms a 163 km (101 mile) ship canal in Egypt between Port Said (Bûr Sa'îd) on the
Mediterranean and Suez (El Suweis) on the Red Sea.
The canal allows water
transport from Europe to Asia without
circumnavigating Africa. Before the construction of the canal, also some transport was
conducted by offloading ships and carrying the goods overland between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.
The canal consists of two parts, north and south of the Great Bitter Lake.
It was built between 25 April 1859 and
1869 by a French company (Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez -
Universal Company of the Suez Ship Canal) led by Ferdinand de
Lesseps while the plan for the project was created by Alois
Negrelli, an Austrian engineer, the
canal was owned by the Egyptian government and France. The first ship to pass through
the canal did so on 17 February 1867
and it was inaugurated in an elaborate ceremony on 17 November 1869; Giuseppe Verdi wrote the famous opera Aida for this ceremony. It is estimated that 1.5 million Egyptians worked on the canal and that 125,000 died, many due
to cholera. External debts forced Egypt to
sell its share in the canal to the United Kingdom, and British troops
moved in to protect it in 1882.
On 26 July 1956, Egypt seized the canal,
which caused Britain, France and Israel to invade in the week-long Suez War. The United
Nations declared the canal Egyptian property.
After the Six Day War in 1967, the
canal remained closed until June 5, 1975. A
UN peacekeeping force has been stationed in the Sinai Peninsula since 1974.
Picture of the Suez Canal from Earth orbit, courtesy NASA.
The canal has no locks because there is no sea level difference. The canal
allows ships with up to 15 m (50 feet) of draught to pass, and improvements are planned to
increase this to 22 m (72 feet) by 2010 to allow supertanker passage. Presently supertankers can offload part of their load onto a canal-owned boat and reload
at the other end of the canal. There is one shipping lane with several passing areas.
Some 15,000 ships pass through the canal each year, bearing about 14% of world shipping. The
passage takes between 11 and 16 hours.
Connections between the shores
For north to south:
In El Qantara there is a
high-level fixed road bridge.
In 2001 the El Ferdan railway bridge 20 km north of Ismailia was completed: the
longest swing span bridge in the world. The previous bridge was destroyed
in 1967 during the Arab-Israeli conflict.
South of the Great Bitter Lake is the Ahmed Hamdi tunnel, built in 1983. Because of leakage problems, in the period 1992-1995
a new water-tight tunnel was built inside the old one.
See Also
External links
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