Cairo is one of the great cities of the world — chaotic, overwhelming, beautiful, and ancient all at once. Africa's largest city by population, with somewhere between 20 and 25 million people in the greater metropolitan area, it sits where the Nile meets the edge of the Sahara, and it has been a centre of power for five thousand years. The Pyramids of Giza are technically in the adjacent city of Giza, but you can see them from the city limits, and they are the reason most visitors come.
The city divides into distinct zones that feel like separate worlds. Islamic Cairo — the medieval city east of the centre — is a dense warren of mosques, minarets, markets, and Ottoman-era houses. The Khan el-Khalili bazaar is its famous centrepiece, but the real pleasure is getting lost in the surrounding lanes, emerging into a courtyard or a caravanserai that looks unchanged since the 14th century. The Al-Azhar Mosque, the Ibn Tulun Mosque, and the Mohammed Ali Mosque on the Citadel are the main monuments.
Coptic Cairo — Old Cairo — clusters around the ruins of a Roman fortress south of the centre, where the oldest Christian churches in Egypt stand alongside the Ben Ezra Synagogue. The Coptic Museum here is outstanding. To the east, the vast City of the Dead stretches for kilometres — a Mamluk-era necropolis where a large population still lives among the tombs.
Downtown is the European-flavoured 19th-century city built by the Khedive Ismail, centred on Tahrir Square and the Egyptian Museum, with its unmatched collection of pharaonic art, culminating in the solid-gold death mask of Tutankhamun. The Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, opened in stages from 2021, is the new home for the Tutankhamun collection and much else.
Zamalek, on Gezira Island in the Nile, is the affluent neighbourhood favoured by expats and the diplomatic community, with good restaurants, the Cairo Tower, and the Cairo Opera House. It offers a relative calm that the rest of the city does not.
Allow at least three or four days. Cairo rewards patience: the traffic is genuinely awful, everything takes longer than expected, and the scale of the place is humbling.
