Blue Desert

---

title: "Blue Desert" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["deserts-of-egypt"] description: "Area of the Sinai Desert in Egypt" topic_path: "geography/egypt" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Desert" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Area of the Sinai Desert in Egypt ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox landform"]

Field	Value
name	Blue Desert
type	Desert
photo	Blue Desert, Sinai, Egypt.jpg
photo_caption	The Blue Desert in 2016, somewhat faded
map	Egypt
label	Blue Desert
label_position	bottom
location	South Sinai, Egypt
coordinates
elevation_ft
surface_elevation_ft
length	6.5 km
area	14 km2
geology
free_label_1	Creator
free_data_1	Jean Verame
free_label_2	created in
free_data_2	1980
website
::

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The Blue Desert (; also known as the Sinai Peace Junction) is an area of the Sinai Desert near Saint Catherine, where a number of rocks are painted blue.

This piece of art was created in 1980 when, following the signing of the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty, Belgian artist Jean Verame visited Sinai to paint a line of peace. Verame gained the permission of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and received a grant of ten tons of paint from the United Nations.

History

After the official signing of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty in Washington DC on 26 March 1979, Belgian artist Jean Verame wanted to celebrate this historical peace in his own way.

Verame first came to Sinai in 1978. Inspired by the hit song "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue", he spent two years attempting to gain permission from Egyptian authorities to pursue his artistic dream. With the official approval of Egypt's president at the time, Anwar El-Sadat himself, and 10 tonnes of paint provided by the UN, Jean started painting the desert blue. One year later, the "Line of Peace", or the "Sinai Peace Junction" as it is also sometimes called, extended almost 6.5km with boulders rising up to nine meters in height, all painted blue.

Location

The Blue Desert stretches between Dahab and St Catherine, known as the Plateau of Hallaoui.

Other places

Four years after Sinai's Line of Peace, Verame completed another blue painting. This time, it was in Tafraout, Morocco. With approval granted by the late Moroccan Monarch King Hassan II, Verame went into the mountains with a team of firemen and 18 tons of blue, red, violet and white paint. In three months he and his team painted granite boulders and small hills of the Anti-Atlas Mountains: "Les Pierres Bleus" (The Blue Rocks).

Gallery

02 sinai.JPG 08_sinai.JPG 01 maroc.JPG

References

References

1. Kinsella, Clodagh. "The Egyptian hike that's rewriting history".
2. "Sinai - Blue Desert".
3. (2011-07-06). "Jean Vérame's Les Roches Bleues".
4. "Blue Desert".
5. (2008-10-14). "Al-Ahram Weekly {{!}} Travel {{!}} Snap shots".
6. (2020-02-24). "فعل الطبيعة أم الإنسان..ما حقيقة "الصحراء الزرقاء" بسيناء مصر؟".
7. الاتحاد, صحيفة. (2020-09-12). ""تافراوت" المغربية.. من قرية صغيرة إلى مزار عالمي".

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::