A modern library on the Alexandria waterfront, built as a deliberate answer to the ancient one that was lost.
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina sits on the Corniche, close to where the ancient library is thought to have stood. The building is a huge tilted disc of granite, angled towards the sea like a rising sun, its outer wall carved with characters from scripts around the world.
It opened in 2002 and it is the best modern building in Egypt.
The main reading room is the reason. It steps down over eleven cascading levels under a slanted glass roof, and it is one of the most impressive interior spaces anywhere in the Mediterranean. You can walk in and look at it.
It is not only a library. The complex holds several museums — antiquities, manuscripts, and a science museum — plus a planetarium and permanent galleries, so there is a good deal to do inside beyond admiring the architecture.
And it is a deliberate act of memory. The ancient Library of Alexandria was the great intellectual project of the Hellenistic world and its loss became the standard shorthand for cultural catastrophe. Rebuilding on the same shoreline is a statement, and the building carries it well.
The ancient library was founded under the early Ptolemies in the third century BC and was attached to the Mouseion, a research institution that drew scholars from across the Greek world. Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth while working here.
The roll call goes further: Euclid worked in Ptolemaic Alexandria, and the city's scholars mapped stars, edited Homer and dissected the workings of the human body while Rome was still a regional power. For about two centuries this was the gravitational centre of Greek science.
It did not burn down in one dramatic night. The collection declined over centuries through fire, funding cuts, political upheaval and neglect, and no single event accounts for its end.
The modern building came from an international architecture competition won by the Norwegian practice Snøhetta, then little known, whose tilted granite disc made the firm's name. The carved characters on the outer wall are drawn from writing systems across the world — the building's way of saying that writing itself, not any one language, is the subject.
The modern library was built through an international project led by Egypt and UNESCO, and opened in 2002. It has shelf space for millions of volumes, and the collection has grown steadily since opening.
Morning or early afternoon. Alexandria is at its best in spring and autumn; it genuinely rains in winter.
Opening hours: Open most days with reduced weekend hours. Check current times before travelling from Cairo.
Opening hours and ticket prices may change. Please confirm the latest details before visiting.
Alexandria's museum of the city's long history, in a palace on Tariq al-Horreya Street, opened in 2003 with about 1,800 pieces from the Pharaonic to the Islamic periods.
The Roman theatre and lecture halls of ancient Alexandria, in the middle of the modern city, found by accident during building work and excavated mainly by Polish teams.
A single column of Aswan granite on a hill of rubble — the last thing standing of the Serapeum, and nothing whatever to do with Pompey.
A Roman tomb cut three levels into the rock under Alexandria, where Egyptian, Greek and Roman art collide in a single room.
A fifteenth-century fort built on the foundations — and partly out of the stones — of the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
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Bags go through security and large ones must be left at the entrance.
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