One of the least-expected museums in Africa: a Belle Epoque villa on the Giza side of the Nile containing a remarkable collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Bey (1877–1953) was an Egyptian politician and art collector who assembled what is probably the finest collection of Western art in the Arab world: Monets, Renoirs, a Gauguin, Corot landscapes, Rodin bronzes, and Ingres drawings, among others.
The collection is displayed in the original family villa, which has been preserved as a museum since 1962. The rooms are intimate and the paintings are hung in the old-fashioned floor-to-ceiling manner. It gets very few foreign visitors and the experience is unusual: standing alone in a room looking at a genuine Monet water lily painting in a 1920s Cairo villa 10 minutes' drive from the pyramids. Opening hours are limited — check before visiting.