A Mediterranean city with a Roman theatre, a modern library on the site of the ancient one, and a completely different climate.
Founded by Alexander in 331 BC and the capital of Egypt for nearly a thousand years, Alexandria was the intellectual centre of the ancient Mediterranean — the Library, the Museum, Euclid, Eratosthenes, the Pharos lighthouse.
Almost none of it survives above ground. Earthquakes, subsidence and continuous rebuilding have taken the ancient city, and much of it is now underwater in the harbour.
What is there instead is a long, salt-worn Mediterranean seafront with faded Italianate buildings, a genuinely different atmosphere from Cairo, and a climate cooler by several degrees.
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Opened in 2002, a deliberate revival of the ancient library on a site near where it is thought to have stood. Snøhetta’s building is a vast tilted disc, its granite outer wall carved with characters from every writing system, angled towards the sea like a rising sun.
The reading room seats around 2,000 on eleven cascading levels and is one of the great modern interiors. There are museums of antiquities and manuscripts inside, a planetarium, and rotating exhibitions.
The ancient city
Kom el-Dikka, a Roman theatre with marble seating, excavated in the 1960s when foundations were being dug for a housing block, along with baths and lecture halls.
The Catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa, second century AD, a three-level rock-cut tomb complex reached by a spiral staircase around a shaft, where Egyptian, Greek and Roman funerary art are mixed in the same chamber — Anubis in Roman armour. It is the strangest place in Egypt.
Pompey’s Pillar, a 27-metre granite column that has nothing to do with Pompey, standing on the site of the Serapeum.
Qaitbay Citadel, a fifteenth-century fort built on the foundations of the Pharos lighthouse, using stone that fell from it.
The modern city
The Corniche runs for miles along the seafront. Cavafy’s apartment, where the Greek poet lived, is a small museum. The Royal Jewellery Museum and Montaza Palace gardens are at the eastern end.
Seafood is the reason many Cairenes come — the fish restaurants around the Eastern Harbour and in Bahari, where you pick from ice and it is grilled.
Getting there
Trains from Ramses Station in Cairo, roughly hourly, about two and a half hours in first or second class. Book at the station or online through the ENR site. It is cheap, comfortable and much the best way.
Buses from Cairo Gateway also run. Driving takes about three hours on the desert road.
Day trip or overnight
Doable in a long day — early train out, late train back — but tight. An overnight lets you see the catacombs and the library properly and eat fish in the evening, which is the point of Alexandria.
