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Egypt

8 city guides · Africa

Cities in Egypt (8)

Africa
🇪🇬 Egypt

Alexandria

Alexandria (الإسكندرية — Al-Iskandariyya, population 5.2 million) is Egypt's second city and Mediterranean port, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC as the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt. In the ancient world it was the most important city in the Mediterranean — the site of the Lighthouse of Alexandria (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, 135m tall), the Library of Alexandria (the greatest library ever assembled, holding the intellectual inheritance of the Hellenistic world — lost to fire and neglect between 48 BC and 640 AD), and the Mouseion (the first research institution in history, precursor to the modern university). Alexandria retains a distinctly Mediterranean character different from Cairo: the Corniche (the 20km seafront promenade along the Mediterranean), the French and Italian-inspired architecture of the belle époque, the fish and seafood culture of the Mediterranean, and the literary legacy of the Greek-Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy and Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.

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🇪🇬 Egypt

Cairo

Cairo (Al-Qahira — "The Victorious") is Africa's largest city and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, at the point where the Nile Delta begins and the Eastern and Western Deserts meet. The city is an overwhelming, exhilarating layering of civilizations: 4,500-year-old pyramids 20 minutes by taxi from the urban sprawl, 10th-century Fatimid mosques beside Coptic churches that predate Islam by 600 years, Ottoman palaces, Belle Époque boulevards and a chaotic megalopolis of 22 million people navigating one of the world's most ferocious traffic systems. The Egyptian Museum holds the world's most extraordinary collection of ancient artifacts including Tutankhamun's golden mask. Islamic Cairo — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — contains the greatest concentration of medieval Islamic architecture in the world.

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🇪🇬 Egypt

Giza

Giza (population 4.1 million — "Al-Jizah" in Arabic) is the most precisely Pyramids-of-Giza single most iconic archaeological site in the world. The Great Pyramid of Khufu (the most precisely 2560-BCE-construction single oldest and only surviving ancient Wonder of the World: the most precisely 146.5-metres-original-height and the most precisely 2.3-million-stone-blocks single Great Pyramid construction statistics), the Great Sphinx (the most precisely 73-metre-long and the most precisely 20-metre-tall single largest-monolithic-stone-sculpture in the world: the most precisely Khafre-pharaoh-face single most commonly accepted Sphinx identity), the Solar Boat Museum (the most precisely Khufu-solar-boat-1954-discovered single perfectly preserved 43-metre ancient Egyptian cedar boat), and the Pyramid of Khafre and Menkaure (the most precisely Giza Plateau single three-pyramid complex). Giza is the most precisely 4,500-years-old single continuously visited tourist destination in the world — the Great Pyramid was already the most ancient single tourist attraction in the ancient world when Herodotus visited in 450 BCE.

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Hurghada

Hurghada is the largest city on Egypt's Red Sea coast — 248,000 residents in a 37km strip of resort development along the western shore of the Red Sea, opposite the Sinai Peninsula. Founded in 1905 as a small fishing village, Hurghada was developed as a Soviet-era resort from the 1970s and expanded dramatically from the 1990s onwards with mass tourism infrastructure from Russia, Germany, and Eastern Europe (currently the most visited destination in Egypt for package tourists). The city has three distinct parts: El Dahar (the original Old Town — the authentic Egyptian fishing community with a market, mosques, and local restaurants), Sekalla (the mid-section, with the main strip of tourist bars and dive shops), and Sahl Hasheesh (the upscale gated resort bay, 18km south, with the most architecturally ambitious resort hotels in Egypt). The reason to visit Hurghada is underwater: the Egyptian Red Sea (specifically the area around Hurghada and Sharm el-Sheikh, across the Gulf of Suez) has the most accessible and genuinely spectacular coral reef ecosystem in the world after the Great Barrier Reef — with over 1,000 species of fish, the largest concentration of coral species in any sea, and visibility of 30+ metres in most conditions. The Giftun Islands (a protected national park, 6km offshore) have the best snorkelling reef near Hurghada. Best months: October–April (water 24–28°C, air 20–28°C, minimal wind).

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Luxor

Luxor (population 506,000 in the city; 1.2 million in the governorate) is the site of the ancient Egyptian capital of Thebes — the most densely concentrated ancient monument site on earth (more than a third of the world's ancient monuments are concentrated in and around Luxor, which the ancient Egyptians called Waset and the Greeks named Thebai). The Luxor Temple and Karnak Temple on the East Bank of the Nile (the 'city of the living' in ancient Egyptian cosmology, where the sun rises) and the Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, Medinet Habu, and the Colossi of Memnon on the West Bank (the 'city of the dead' where the sun sets) together form the most extraordinary concentration of ancient art and architecture in the world. Thebes was the capital of the New Kingdom of Egypt (1550–1077 BCE — the most powerful period in ancient Egyptian history: the 18th, 19th, and 20th dynasties; the pharaohs of the New Kingdom include Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, Ramesses II (Ramesses the Great — the longest-reigning Egyptian pharaoh (66 years), the most militarily successful, and the builder of the Abu Simbel temples, the Ramesseum, and the hypostyle hall at Karnak), and Ramesses III). The Valley of the Kings (the royal necropolis of the New Kingdom: 63 royal tombs discovered; the most famous: KV62 — the tomb of Tutankhamun, discovered by Howard Carter on November 4, 1922, containing the most spectacular collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts ever found). Best months: October–March.

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Marsa Alam

Marsa Alam is the Red Sea Riviera's best-kept secret — a quiet Egyptian resort town 220 km south of Hurghada where the underwater world rivals anything in the Indo-Pacific but the beaches remain uncrowded by mass tourism standards. The warm, ultra-clear Red Sea here shelters one of the world's most reliable populations of dugongs, drawing on the extensive seagrass meadows of Marsa Abu Dabbab bay. Hammerhead sharks aggregate on the Abu Dabbab reef, manta rays cruise the Elphinstone pinnacle, and the wreck of the Umbria — technically just north in Sudanese waters — is rated among the world's ten best wreck dives. On land, the Eastern Desert hinterland is a world of Bedouin camel trails, Ptolemaic amethyst mines at Wadi el-Hudi and the 4th-century CE Coptic monastery of St Paul, the oldest in the world. Marsa Alam airport opened in 2003, unlocking this stretch of coast to direct European charter flights — but development has been deliberately slower than Hurghada or Sharm el-Sheikh.

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Port Said

Port Said is Egypt's second most important port city (after Alexandria), a city of 750,000 at the Mediterranean entrance of the Suez Canal — one of the most important strategic chokepoints in the world, through which 12-13% of global trade passes, equivalent to 1 billion tonnes of goods per year. The city was founded in 1859 specifically to serve the construction of the Suez Canal (begun April 1859, opened November 1869 — the 10-year construction employed 1.5 million Egyptian forced labourers, of whom an estimated 120,000 died), named after Sa'id Pasha, the Egyptian Khedive who granted the canal concession to Ferdinand de Lesseps. The opening of the Suez Canal on November 17, 1869 was the defining infrastructure event of the 19th century — shortening the sea route between Europe and Asia by 7,000 km, replacing the Cape of Good Hope route and reshaping global trade patterns within a decade. Port Said's architecture reflects this global significance: the city has more than 500 historic buildings in the ornate wooden-balcony style of the Egyptian Belle Époque (1870s-1930s), the finest concentration of this colonial Mediterranean architecture in Egypt; the Port Said lighthouse (1869, the first permanent electric lighthouse in Africa) stood at the canal entrance; and the de Lesseps statue (removed after the 1956 nationalization but the plinth remains) marked the point where Khedive Ismail inaugurated the canal in the presence of Empress Eugénie of France. The 1956 Suez Crisis — when British and French forces invaded Egypt after Nasser nationalized the canal — was one of the defining crises of the Cold War and Port Said bore the brunt of the military assault. The city has a free-trade zone established 1975, making it a major retail destination for Egyptians seeking duty-free goods.

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Sharm El-Sheikh

Sharm el-Sheikh is a Red Sea resort city on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt (population 73,000 permanent residents, but accommodating up to 1 million tourists annually) — the premier diving and snorkelling destination in the world after the Great Barrier Reef, built around the extraordinary coral reef ecosystem of the Red Sea (the Red Sea has the highest water temperature and salinity of any major ocean region, creating the highest coral biodiversity outside the Coral Triangle; the reefs around Sharm el-Sheikh — the Ras Mohammed National Park, the Tiran Straits, the Straits of Gubal and the northern Sinai coast — contain over 1,000 species of fish and 250 species of coral; the visibility in the Red Sea can reach 30-40 m — greater than any equivalent reef system in the world). Sharm el-Sheikh was a small fishing village (Sharm el-Sheikh means "bay of the Sheikh" in Arabic) until 1967 when Israel occupied the Sinai in the Six-Day War and began developing it as a resort; returned to Egypt in 1982 under the Camp David Accords, Egypt then accelerated the resort development that created the modern city. The Naama Bay (the main beach resort strip of Sharm el-Sheikh — 2 km of waterfront hotels, diving centres, restaurants and beach clubs built on the north side of the Sharm bay; the centre of tourist Sharm; the Soho Square complex) and the Old Market (Sharm el-Sheikh's original market town, 3 km from Naama Bay, with the traditional bazaar character absent from the purpose-built resort areas) are the two contrasting faces of the city. The Mount Sinai and St. Catherine's Monastery day trip (3.5 hours north — the most significant biblical pilgrimage site in Egypt, where Moses received the Ten Commandments; the oldest continuously operating Christian monastery in the world, founded 337 AD) is the cultural complement to the underwater Sharm experience.

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