Just outside Sharm el Sheikh's international airport stands a mural of smiling world leaders commemorating the “Peacemakers' Summit”, a 1996 conference aimed at resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, while further down the “Peace Highway” a statue of President Hosni Mubarak welcomes visitors to his “City of Peace”.
This resort town at the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula is not only the capital of Egypt's “Red Sea Riviera”, a big contributor to the tourism receipts that are the country's main source of foreign exchange, but it has also become the country's diplomatic capital, the president's summer home and his favourite venue for meetings with other world leaders.
Sharm's favoured status means Saturday's bomb attacks struck at the heart of a regime that prides itself on both economic pragmatism and diplomatic acumen.
As a result of the bombings, the airport's shiny new departures hall was on Sunday packed with visitors like Londoner Rashid Senhaji, 24, cutting short holidays to the “City of Peace”.
Mr Senhaji came to the Sinai resort to relax, only to stay in a hotel just next to one of the bombs when they went off. “My room started to shake. . . I came out and immediately felt the impact I didn't know where to go, what to do,” he said.
Most of the dead, however, were Egyptians, such as the colleagues of Fawzi al-Ashmouni, a taxi driver.
“A lot of hard-working honest people were killed yesterday,” said Mr Ashmouni, who came 15 years ago from the Nile delta city of Mansoura to find employment in what was then Egypt's fastest-growing boom town.
Ironically, Egypt first began to promote its “Red Sea Riviera” in earnest in the mid-1990s as an alternative to the temple towns of the southern Nile valley, which was at that time home to an Islamist insurgency.
It was partly in order to boost the town's reputation for security that the president began to host conferences such as the Peacemakers' Summit, which allowed Egypt to showcase Sharm el Sheikh and its hotels to an international audience.
Thanks partially to this campaign, Egypt's tourist industry was able to recover from a devastating 1997 massacre of tourists in the Nile town of Luxor, although it took two to three years and billions of dollars in lost receipts to due so.
In 2003 and 2004 the resort hosted the family of Tony Blair, British prime minister, a move aimed in part at restoring Egypt's reputation as a safe destination after September 11 and the Iraq war caused further shocks to tourism.
The Sinai peninsula has had its share of troubles recently, including a January 2004 air crash just off the resort that killed more than 130 people, and the October 2004 bombing of a hotel in the town of Taba near the Israeli border, which killed 30.
Despite these incidents, Sharm's hotels were busy at the time of Saturday's bombs; and the country's historically resilient tourism industry may bounce back once again.
