Cairo stacks 4,500 years into one skyline: Old Kingdom pyramids at Saqqara and Dahshur, Fatimid minarets on Al-Muizz Street, Coptic chapels built inside a Roman fort, and Belle Époque palaces of the khedives. These three days follow that stratigraphy in order.
The world's oldest stone building (c. 2670 BC): six stacked mastabas designed by Imhotep. The restored burial chamber and the colonnaded entrance hall reopened in 2020, and the Imhotep Museum sits by the ticket gate. Open 08:00–17:00.
Egypt's capital for eight dynasties is now a palm grove of scattered stone. The centrepiece is a 10-metre limestone colossus of Ramses II lying on its back in a purpose-built hall, beside an alabaster sphinx of roughly 80 tonnes.
Sneferu built both here around 2600 BC. The Bent Pyramid changes angle mid-construction from 54 to 43 degrees — a structural correction frozen in stone — while the Red Pyramid is the first true smooth-sided pyramid. Both can be entered.
Completed in 879 AD and Cairo's oldest mosque surviving in its original form: mud-brick arcades around a courtyard the size of a football pitch, with an external spiral minaret modelled on Samarra in Iraq.
Belgian industrialist Édouard Empain built this Hindu-Cambodian fantasy in 1911 as the showpiece of the new desert suburb of Heliopolis. Derelict for decades, it reopened in 2020 as a museum on the city's foundation and its tram network.
Africa's first railway ran Cairo–Alexandria from 1854, and this 1933 museum keeps its hardware: Khedive Said's private saloon, Empress Eugénie's carriage from the Suez Canal opening, and hundreds of scale locomotive models.
Seat of Egypt's rulers from 1874 until the 1952 revolution, and where King Farouk signed his abdication. The public wings hold the royal arms collection, presidential gifts and silver, all under ceilings by Italian and French court decorators.
Ismail Pasha's 1860s attempt at a Paris on the Nile — Haussmann-style blocks, wrought-iron balconies and the 1908 Groppi café. The statue of banker Talaat Harb replaced one of Suleiman Pasha, a swap that marks the end of the monarchy.
The Church of the Virgin Mary is suspended on the bastions of the Roman fortress of Babylon, its nave floor hanging above the gatehouse. Founded in the 3rd–4th century, rebuilt repeatedly; the cedar screens and 110 icons are the draw.
A 9th-century church bought by the Jewish community in 882 AD, whose sealed storeroom held the Cairo Geniza — some 300,000 medieval documents on trade, law and daily life, dispersed to Cambridge and beyond in the 1890s.
The spine of Fatimid Cairo, founded in 969 AD. The Qalawun complex (1285) packs hospital, madrasa and mausoleum into one facade; Bayt al-Suhaymi, a 1648 merchant house, shows how the elite actually lived behind it.
The City of the Dead is a Mamluk necropolis that has been inhabited for centuries. Qaitbay's 1474 funerary complex — on the old one-pound note — has the finest carved stone dome in Cairo, geometric and floral in one surface.