Top Attractions in Cairo & Giza
Explore the headline places in the Cairo & Giza cluster.
The Imhotep Museum, Saqqara
The site museum at Saqqara, opened in 2006 and named after Imhotep, the architect credited with Djoser's Step Pyramid, the first monumental building in stone.
The Manial Palace (Prince Mohamed Ali Palace), Cairo
The palace and garden estate of Prince Mohammed Ali Tewfik on Rhoda Island, built between 1899 and 1929 and mixing Ottoman, Moorish and Persian styles with European touches.
The Gayer-Anderson Museum, Cairo
Two joined 16th- and 17th-century Cairo houses beside the Ibn Tulun Mosque, restored and furnished by the collector Major Gayer-Anderson, who lived there from 1935 to 1942.
Memphis (Mit Rahina), the Old Kingdom Capital
The village of Mit Rahina on the site of ancient Memphis, with an open-air museum built around a colossal limestone statue of Ramesses II and a large alabaster sphinx.
The Hanging Church (Al-Muallaqa), Old Cairo
The Church of the Virgin Mary in Coptic Cairo, built over a gatehouse of the Roman Babylon Fortress, with a marble pulpit, carved screens and a nave that spans the passage below.
The Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo
Cairo's museum of Islamic art, reopened in 2017 after a car bomb damaged it in 2014, with a collection usually put at roughly 100,000 objects.
The Coptic Museum, Old Cairo
The museum of Egypt's Christian art in Old Cairo, founded by Marcus Simaika beside the Hanging Church, with wall paintings, textiles, woodwork and stained glass.
The Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Hassan, Cairo
The vast Mamluk mosque and madrasa below the Citadel, built between 1356 and 1363, with a minaret of about 80 metres and four iwans around its courtyard.
Al-Muizz Street, Islamic Cairo
About a kilometre of Fatimid Cairo's main street, from Bab al-Futuh to Bab Zuweila, lined with mosques, madrasas and merchants' houses and restored as an open-air museum.
National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC)
The museum in Fustat, Old Cairo, that now holds the Royal Mummies gallery — not the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir — and tells Egypt's story from prehistory to the modern age.
Bab Zuweila
The stone gate of 1092 that marked the southern edge of Fatimid Cairo, topped by two Mamluk minarets that can be climbed for views over Islamic Cairo.
The Baron Empain Palace
A Belgian industrialist's Hindu-temple fantasy in Heliopolis — derelict for decades, restored, and open to the public since 2020.
The Mosque of Ibn Tulun
The oldest mosque in Egypt surviving in its original form — a vast brick courtyard with a spiral minaret, and almost nobody in it.
Al-Azhar Mosque
Founded with the city itself in 970, still the leading seat of Sunni scholarship, and a building where six centuries of patronage stand around one courtyard.
Cairo Tower
A 187-metre concrete tower on Gezira Island with the highest public view over Cairo and the Nile.
The Mosque of Muhammad Ali
The alabaster-faced Ottoman mosque crowning the Citadel, and the building that defines the Cairo skyline.
Coptic Cairo
A walled quarter of churches, a synagogue and a Roman fortress where Egypt's Christian and Jewish history sits within a few hundred metres.
The Citadel of Saladin
A hilltop fortress that governed Egypt for seven centuries, crowned by the silver domes of the Mosque of Muhammad Ali.
Khan el-Khalili
A medieval market quarter in Islamic Cairo — lanes of metalwork, lanterns, spice and coffee that have been trading on the same ground since the fourteenth century.
The Dahshur Pyramids
The Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid — the two attempts, one failed and one successful, that made Giza possible.
Saqqara and the Step Pyramid of Djoser
The oldest large stone building in the world, at the centre of a burial ground that stayed in use for more than three thousand years.
The Grand Egyptian Museum
A purpose-built museum beside the Giza plateau, holding the complete Tutankhamun collection and a grand staircase of colossal royal statuary.
The Great Sphinx of Giza
A lion's body with a king's head, carved from a single ridge of natural limestone at the foot of Khafre's causeway.
Pyramids of Giza
Three royal pyramids on a limestone plateau at the edge of Cairo — the oldest of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and the only one still standing.
The Egyptian Museum in Tahrir
The old museum on Tahrir Square — crowded, under-labelled, over a century old, and still one of the great collections in the world.
