The Citadel of Saladin

The Citadel sits on a limestone spur below the Muqattam hills, deliberately placed where it could see and be seen from the whole city. It was the seat of Egyptian government for something close to seven hundred years.

Most visitors come for one building inside it — the Mosque of Muhammad Ali, whose Ottoman domes and thin pencil minarets are the shape people picture when they picture Cairo's skyline.

The view. From the terrace outside the mosque you look across the whole of Cairo, and on a clear day the pyramids are visible on the horizon beyond the city. It is the best single vantage point in Cairo and it costs you nothing beyond the entry ticket.

The mosque interior is worth going inside for. It is Ottoman in style rather than Egyptian — modelled on the great mosques of Istanbul — with an enormous chandelier-hung dome and walls faced in alabaster, which is why it is often called the Alabaster Mosque.

And the Citadel is more than one building. Two much older mosques stand within the walls, along with several museums and long stretches of wall and tower that you can walk. Visitors who allocate forty minutes usually regret it.

Salah ad-Din — Saladin — began the fortress in the 1170s, fortifying the high ground between the two existing cities of Fustat and Fatimid Cairo against Crusader attack. Successive dynasties kept adding to it.

Its secret weapon was water: Saladin's engineers cut a spiral well shaft nearly ninety metres down through the rock to the water table, so the fortress could stand a siege. The Well of Joseph survives, and it is one of the great pieces of medieval engineering in Egypt.

The Mosque of Muhammad Ali is far later: built in the first half of the nineteenth century by the Ottoman governor who founded the dynasty that ruled Egypt until 1952. He deliberately built in the Istanbul manner rather than the local Mamluk one, and the choice was political as much as aesthetic.

The same ruler gave the Citadel its darkest scene: in 1811 he invited the Mamluk leadership to a ceremony here and had them killed in the walled descent from the gate — the end of six centuries of Mamluk power in a single afternoon.

The Citadel remained a military installation into the twentieth century, which is why parts of it feel like a barracks rather than a palace, and why several of its museums are military.

• The Mosque of Muhammad Ali, with its alabaster walls and Ottoman domes
• The terrace view across Cairo, with the pyramids visible on a clear day
• The Mosque of al-Nasir Muhammad, fourteenth-century Mamluk, much older and much plainer
• The Mosque of Sulayman Pasha, the earliest Ottoman mosque in Egypt
• Gawhara Palace and the museums, for those with a third hour
• The walls and towers, walkable in stretches