Cairo University, founded in 1908, is Egypt's most prestigious university and one of the oldest in the Arab world. The campus occupies a large site in Giza, across the Nile from Garden City, with the main gate and iconic central building facing Nahdet Misr Square. The Nahdet Misr sculpture — a heroic bronze by Mahmoud Mukhtar showing a peasant woman lifting a veil from a sphinx — stands in the square outside the main gate and is one of Egypt's most recognisable pieces of public art.
The campus is open to visitors during the day. Walking through gives a sense of the scale of Egyptian higher education — 300,000 students — and the campus architecture, which mixes the original 1920s neo-Mamluk buildings with later modernist additions, is interesting. Several of Egypt's leading political figures have been alumni.