For Valentine’s Day, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission sends love from space, capturing the heart-shaped oasis of Faiyum, just south of Cairo, Egypt.
Zoom in or click on the circles to explore this image at its full resolution.
This false-colour image was processed using Sentinel-2’s near-infrared channel, which highlights vegetation in red, so that the Nile Delta and the Fayum Oasis appear in red – a red flower with a natural heart.
The red triangle of Egypt’s fertile Nile Delta stands in contrast to the surrounding desert of northeast Africa. This difference is shaped by the Nile River, whose life-giving waters have long transformed the arid land into a lush agricultural landscape.
With less than 3% of Egypt’s land suitable for agriculture, the Delta is an important farming region. A patchwork of fields appears in various shades of red, reflecting different crops and growth stages. Key produce includes cotton, rice and sugar cane.
Urban areas stand out in grey, the largest being Cairo, Egypt’s capital, at the base of the Delta. Zooming in, the Pyramids of Giza can be spotted on the rocky plateau at the city’s southwestern edge.
The crisp boundary between the red vegetation and the yellow–brown desert makes it easy to trace the river’s course and reveals variations in the topography. The cultivated area extends farther west of the Nile, where flatter terrain allows for easier irrigation compared to the higher ground to the east.
Around 100 km southwest of Cairo lies the red, heart-shaped Faiyum Oasis – a vast natural depression. Unlike other Egyptian oases, which depend primarily on groundwater, Faiyum is fed directly by the Nile waters through the Bahr Yussef canal. To its north, the dark expanse of Lake Qaroun – now saline – marks the remains of what once was a much larger freshwater lake.
On the right side of the image, the Suez Canal stretches from Port Said on the Mediterranean coast to the Gulf of Suez, the northwestern arm of the Red Sea. As one of the world’s most important waterways, the Suez Canal provides a direct link between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.
This image was generated using multiple scans captured by Copernicus Sentinel-2 between July and December 2025. By selecting cloud-free pixels over time, such clear high-resolution mosaics can be created, which are especially valuable to overcome the persistent challenges of limited visibility owing to cloud cover.