Port Said was built from 1859 by an international workforce and still shows it: Italianate churches, Greek trading houses, Art Deco department stores, and simsimiya folk music played on a small lyre. Three days of museums, culture palaces and neighbourhood streets.
The 1893 Canal Authority headquarters carries three green domes over a white Italianate facade — the image printed on Egypt's canal stamps. Interiors are closed to the public, but the waterfront colonnade and clock wing photograph best in early light.
Simon Arzt, the 1932 department store that sold duty-free cigarettes to every ship transiting the canal, is Port Said's Art Deco landmark. The corner rotunda and steel-framed balconies survive; the ground floor now holds small shops.
The Italian Catholic church of Santa Eugénie keeps a Romanesque brick facade, marble altar and stained glass shipped from Italy for the canal's European workforce. It served the Italian community that built much of the old town.
Port Fouad, laid out in 1926 on the Asian bank, was planned as a garden suburb for canal staff: low villas with deep verandas, wide planted streets and company housing in a single consistent style. The free ferry crosses in ten minutes.
The Military Museum on 23rd July Street covers the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1967-73 canal war through dioramas, captured hardware in the courtyard and large canvases of the Port Said civilian resistance. Labelling is largely Arabic.
Housed in a canal-era villa near the corniche, the modern art museum hangs Egyptian painting from the 1930s onward — seascapes, canvases of canal labour and dredging crews — plus rotating shows by artists working in Port Said today.
The Ministry of Culture's palace on Al Gomhoreya Street programmes simsimiya folk ensembles, damma singing circles, children's theatre and gallery shows. Simsimiya, played on a five-string lyre, is Port Said's own genre.
Ferial Garden sits where the canal meets the Mediterranean, its most-photographed feature the empty plinth of the Ferdinand de Lesseps statue pulled down in 1956 and never replaced. Families fill the benches as ships queue offshore.
Al Abbasi Mosque (1904) is the city's oldest, combining Ottoman pencil minarets with a green-and-white striped facade. Visitors are welcome outside the five prayer times; women should cover their hair and shoes come off at the carpet line.
Sharaa El Nahda and the arcades around it are where Port Saidis actually shop: bolts of cloth, imported denim and the city's tailoring trade, all a legacy of the duty-free port status granted in 1975 and still half-alive today.
Port Fouad's afternoon boats land beside wooden yards where hulls are still shaped by hand. Buyers bid on crates of sea bass and mullet, and the stalls opposite will grill whatever you buy while you wait at a plastic table.
The ahwas along Safeya Zaghloul serve mint tea and shisha under the arcades, backgammon boards permanently out, and a simsimiya player occasionally arriving after dark. Tables spread across the pavement by around 20:00.