Alexandria travel guide

Top 10 sights in Alexandria

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   1

   Bibliotheca Alexandrina

   A library opened in 2002 under UNESCO's patronage in memory of the ancient one, its reading room a disc tilted toward the sea under a roof of glass panels. The granite wall around it is carved with characters from some hundred and twenty scripts.

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2. 

   2© Dennis G. Jarvis · CC BY-SA 2.0

   El-Mursi Abul Abbas Mosque

   A mosque and Sufi shrine in the Anfoushi quarter, over the tomb of a thirteenth-century mystic from Murcia who settled in Alexandria. The present cream-coloured building, octagonal on a high plinth, was raised in the 1930s and 40s.

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   3

   Pompey's Pillar

   A red granite column twenty-seven metres high, raised between 298 and 302 for Diocletian and standing on the ruins of the Serapeum, the temple whose library was the successor to the great one. Crusaders assumed Pompey was buried under it and the wrong name has stuck.

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4. 

   4© Daniel Mayer · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Serapeum of Alexandria

   The temple of Serapis, the god the Ptolemies invented to bind Greeks and Egyptians together, built by Ptolemy III and destroyed by a Christian mob in 391. Its site is marked by a granite column twenty-seven metres high, misnamed Pompey's Pillar.

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5. 

   5© Asiatologist · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa

   A tomb complex of the second century cut three levels into the rock and reached by a spiral stair around an open shaft, down which the dead were lowered. Egyptian, Greek and Roman ornament are mixed in the same rooms, sometimes in the same figure.

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6. 

   6© Ahnaf Saber · CC BY 3.0

   Citadel of Qaitbay

   A fortress built in the 1470s by Sultan Qaitbay on the spot where the Pharos lighthouse had stood, using the fallen blocks of it. It guards the harbour mouth and is the city's most photographed building.

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7. 

   7© Jerrye & Roy Klotz, MD · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Montaza Palace

   A summer palace of the ruling dynasty on a headland east of the city, mixing Florentine and Ottoman styles, set in gardens of palm and pine. The grounds are a public park; the palace itself is used by the state.

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   8

   Pharos

   The lighthouse built under Ptolemy II in the third century BC on the island at the harbour mouth, over a hundred metres high and among the seven wonders of the ancient world. Earthquakes brought it down between the tenth and fourteenth centuries.

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9. 

   9© Summering2018 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Alexandria National Museum

   Museum in Alexandria opened in 2003 in an Italianate villa of 1929. Its 1,800 objects run from Pharaonic through Greco-Roman to Coptic and Islamic Egypt, arranged by floor.

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10. 

    10© Roland Unger · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Saint Mark's Coptic Orthodox Cathedral

    The historic seat of the Coptic pope, on the spot where tradition holds that St Mark founded the Egyptian church around AD 42 and was killed by a mob in 68. The present building is mid-twentieth century over a long succession of earlier ones, and relics of Mark are kept in it.

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1. 

   1© Franck devedjian · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Caesareum of Alexandria

   Temple begun in Alexandria by Cleopatra for Mark Antony and finished by Augustus as an imperial cult site. Cleopatra's Needles stood in front of it until the nineteenth century.

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2. 

   2© Alexandria,_Kirche_St._Katharina.jpg: Roland Unger derivative work: Rabanus Flav · CC BY-SA 3.0

   St. Catherine's Cathedral, Alexandria

   Catholic cathedral of Alexandria, built in 1850 for the Latin community of the port. It is the seat of the apostolic vicariate covering all of Egypt.

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3. 

   3© Unknown authorUnknown author · CC BY-SA 3.0 de

   Ras el-Tin Palace

   A palace begun for Muhammad Ali in the 1830s on the promontory that was once the island of Pharos, looking over the western harbour. Farouk signed his abdication in it in July 1952 and sailed into exile from the quay below; it is now a naval property and closed.

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4. 

   4© Neithsabes · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Kom El-Dikka

   The largest excavated area in Alexandria, a Roman quarter that grew from rich housing into a public centre. It holds the only Roman theatre in Egypt, a bath complex, and rows of lecture halls from a late-antique school.

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   5

   Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue

   A synagogue on Nabi Daniel Street, rebuilt in the 1850s after French troops damaged the earlier building, and among the largest in the Middle East. It was restored and reopened in 2020 for a community now down to a handful of members.

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6. 

   6© Philg88 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Heptastadion

   A causeway of seven stades, some twelve hundred metres, built in the third century BC to join the island of Pharos to the mainland. Silt gathered along it until it became the neck of land the modern city centre stands on.

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   7© لا روسا · CC BY-SA 4.0

   El Agami district

   A district and town of Alexandria governorate, twenty kilometres west of Alexandria. It draws holidaymakers from Alexandria itself and from the Cairo region.

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   8© Roland Unger · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Royal Jewelry Museum

   A museum in the Zizinia district of Alexandria, in the palace where Princess Fatma al-Zahra lived. It holds a collection of the jewellery and ornaments of the Muhammad Ali dynasty of a richness that is hard to price.

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9. 

   9© Roland Unger · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Attarine Mosque

   A mosque in the old commercial quarter, on the site of a church dedicated first to Athanasius and later to Saint Sabas. The present building dates from the early twentieth century and keeps a stone inscription from a much earlier rebuilding.

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    10© Mona Hassan Abo-Abda · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Stanley

    A district near the centre of Alexandria. It is known for the Stanley Bridge, four hundred metres long on six spans, carrying the Corniche across the bay, and for its private beaches.

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