Alexandria is Egypt's great exception. While the rest of the country looks towards the desert and the Nile, this city looks out to the Mediterranean, and that difference changes everything: the air is cooler, the light softer, the pace slower, and there's a cosmopolitan nostalgia in the air that makes it unique. Founded by Alexander the Great, ruled by the Ptolemies and by Cleopatra, for centuries it was one of the most brilliant cities of the ancient world, a capital of learning with its legendary Library, crowned by the Lighthouse, one of the seven wonders.
Of that Greek and Roman Alexandria only ruins remain (the ancient city lies partly under the sea and under the modern one), but its ghost lives on. You feel it in the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a spectacular building that brings the myth back to life; in the Qaitbay Citadel, built on the stones of the fallen Lighthouse; in the catacombs where Egyptian, Greek and Roman gods mingle; and in the old-time cafés, the creaking trams and the slightly faded colonial buildings that recall the cosmopolitan city of the early 20th century, the city of Greeks, Italians and Jews celebrated by poets like Cavafy and novelists like Durrell.
This guide covers Alexandria with a practical yet evocative eye: which monuments to see, how to get there from Cairo and get around, where to eat the best fish in the country, how to stroll the Corniche at sunset and why this melancholy city by the sea deserves a place on your trip. Alexandria doesn't dazzle with pyramids: it seduces slowly, with its unique mix of ancient history and Mediterranean decadence.
Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, during his conquest of Egypt, on a strategic spot on the Mediterranean coast. After Alexander's death, his general Ptolemy took Egypt and founded the Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled from Alexandria for almost three centuries, down to Cleopatra VII, the last queen, whose death in 30 BC marked the end of independent Egypt and its absorption by Rome. Under the Ptolemies and then under Rome, Alexandria was one of the largest and richest cities of the ancient world, the great intellectual centre of the Mediterranean: here stood the Great Library (which aimed to gather all human knowledge) and the Mouseion, and in front of its harbour rose the Lighthouse, one of the seven wonders. It was also a cradle of early Christianity and a hotbed of philosophy. Its decline came after the Arab conquest of 641, when the capital moved inland; the Library was lost, the Lighthouse collapsed in earthquakes, and the city shrank to a minor port, reviving only in the 19th century. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of historic and modern Egypt: from ancient Memphis and the pyramids of Giza to the Arab megacity of Cairo and Mediterranean Alexandria.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The city was born of one man's will and a moment in history that would never come again. In 332 BC, Alexander the Great, the young king of Macedonia who was busy conquering the Persian Empire, entered Egypt. He was welcomed not as an invader but as a liberator who ended the hated Persian rule. The Egyptians crowned him pharaoh, and the priests of the oracle of Amun, in the remote oasis of Siwa, declared him the son of the god. Before heading east again, Alexander wanted to leave a lasting mark on Egypt. In 331 BC he picked a strategic spot on the Mediterranean coast, next to an old fishing village called Rhakotis, and ordered a great city to be founded there that would bear his name: Alexandria.
Legend has it that Alexander himself laid out the city plan, marking the streets with flour, and that birds came and ate the marks. His soothsayers read this as a sign that Alexandria would one day feed people from all over the world. The design, entrusted to the architect Dinocrates, followed the Greek grid model, with wide avenues crossing at right angles, a magnificent harbour sheltered by the island of Pharos and an ambitious urban plan.
Alexander never saw his city finished. He died in Babylon in 323 BC, aged just thirty-two, without ever returning. According to tradition, though, his body was eventually brought to Alexandria and buried in a mausoleum that became one of the great mysteries of the ancient world, because his tomb has never been found. The city he founded was destined to outshine almost any other in the ancient world in fame and splendour.
After Alexander's death, his vast empire was divided among his generals. Egypt went to Ptolemy, a shrewd and capable Macedonian who declared himself pharaoh and founded the Ptolemaic dynasty. It would rule the country from Alexandria for almost three centuries, from 305 to 30 BC. Under the Ptolemies, Alexandria became the largest, richest and most learned city in the Mediterranean world. It was a melting pot where Greeks, Egyptians, Jews and people from every corner of the known world mixed, and probably the first great city in history to reach a million inhabitants.
The Ptolemies' greatest legacy was intellectual. They created the Mouseion (the 'shrine of the Muses', where our word 'museum' comes from), a research institution that brought together the greatest scholars of the age. Alongside it stood the Great Library of Alexandria, which chased a colossal dream: to gather every book in the world. It is said to have held hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls, and every text that reached the port was copied. Some of the greatest minds of antiquity worked there. Euclid laid the foundations of geometry, Eratosthenes measured the Earth's circumference with astonishing accuracy, and Archimedes, Herophilus and Aristarchus of Samos, who had already proposed that the Earth went round the Sun, all left their mark. For centuries, Alexandria was the intellectual capital of humankind.
Facing the harbour, on the island of Pharos, which was joined to the mainland by a causeway, rose another marvel: the Lighthouse of Alexandria. This tower stood more than a hundred metres tall and was topped by a fire whose light, reflected by mirrors, guided sailors. It was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and in many languages it gave its name to every lighthouse that came after.
The story of Ptolemaic Alexandria ends with one of the most famous figures of all time: Cleopatra VII, the last queen of Egypt. She was intelligent, well educated and politically shrewd, and she spoke several languages, including Egyptian, which was rare among the Greek Ptolemies. Cleopatra came to the throne at a time when Rome had become the dominant power in the Mediterranean and Egypt was struggling to keep its independence. Her strategy was to tie herself to the most powerful men in Rome.
First came Julius Caesar, with whom she had a son, Caesarion, and whom she followed to Rome. After Caesar was assassinated, Cleopatra allied herself with, and fell in love with, Mark Antony, one of the three men who shared power in Rome. Together they formed a political and personal alliance that challenged Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. The conflict was settled at the naval battle of Actium in 31 BC, where Antony and Cleopatra's fleet was defeated. The following year, with Octavian's troops at the gates of Alexandria and all hope gone, first Mark Antony and then Cleopatra took their own lives. According to tradition, the queen let herself be bitten by an asp.
Cleopatra's death in 30 BC ended three centuries of Ptolemaic rule and, with them, nearly three thousand years of independent Egypt. The country became a Roman province, the emperor's personal granary. Alexandria remained a great metropolis under Rome, the second city of the Empire, but it was no longer a sovereign capital. The myth of Cleopatra, on the other hand, has only kept growing ever since.
Under Rome, Alexandria remained a leading centre of learning and trade, but it was also a place of tension. The city became one of the cradles of Christianity. A large Christian community flourished here, one of the earliest and most influential theological schools in the world was founded, and the Coptic patriarchate emerged, which still leads Egypt's Christians today. All that ferment had a dark side: clashes between pagans, Jews and Christians were sometimes violent. At the end of the 4th century, the great pagan temple of the Serapeum, which housed part of the Library, was destroyed by a Christian mob. In 415 the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, a symbol of Alexandrian learning, was brutally murdered by a group of fanatics. The episode is often taken as the emblem of the end of classical Alexandria.
The legendary Library disappeared through a long and much-debated process of fires, wars, funding cuts and plain neglect over the centuries, rather than in a single spectacular disaster as the legend tells it. With it, an incalculable share of ancient knowledge was lost.
The final blow came in 641, when Arab armies conquered Egypt. The new rulers did not choose Alexandria as their capital. Instead they founded Fustat, inland, next to what would become Cairo. Stripped of its status and cut off from the new routes of power, Alexandria entered a long decline. The Lighthouse, damaged by one earthquake after another, collapsed completely around the 14th century, and Sultan Qaitbay used its stones to build the fortress that still guards the harbour today. Much of the ancient city sank beneath the sea. For centuries, Alexandria was little more than a modest fishing port, a shadow of what it had once been.
Alexandria slept for centuries until, in the 19th century, it was brought back to life by Muhammad Ali, the founder of modern Egypt, who made it the country's great port and the engine of its opening to the world. The city grew strongly again, driven by the cotton trade, and once more became a cosmopolitan, multicultural place. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Alexandria filled up with Greeks, Italians, French, Jews, Syrians and merchants from all over the Mediterranean, who lived alongside Egyptians in a city of cafés, theatres, clubs and European-style buildings. It was a second golden age, more bourgeois than imperial, but dazzling in its own way.
That cosmopolitan Alexandria was immortalised in literature. The Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, who lived here for almost all his life, made it the melancholy setting of his poems. The British writer Lawrence Durrell portrayed it in his famous 'Alexandria Quartet', and other writers captured that unique mix of decadence, nostalgia and Mediterranean sensuality that still runs through the city.
The cosmopolitan world faded away in the mid-20th century, with the rise of Arab nationalism and the 1952 revolution. The foreign communities gradually left, and Alexandria became a more fully Egyptian city. But it never lost its seafaring soul or its melancholy. In 2002 it reclaimed its great historic emblem, symbolically and spectacularly, with the opening of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the modern library that revives the myth of the ancient one. Today Alexandria is a big metropolis of several million people, a bit chaotic and somewhat worn, but with a charm all its own. It is the only city in Egypt that faces the Mediterranean, and beneath its streets and its waters it still holds the memory of having been one of the capitals of the world.
