Cairo overwhelms you and wins you over almost at the same time. It is a huge, chaotic, noisy city, with legendary traffic and an energy that never stops, but it is also one of the metropolises with the most accumulated history in the world. In its streets, layer upon layer, the Egypt of the pharaohs, the Christian Rome of the Copts, the splendour of medieval Islam with its thousand minarets and the Arab modernity of the 20th century all live side by side. And always, outlined on the horizon to the west, the pyramids of Giza, the only one of the seven wonders of the ancient world still standing.
For centuries the Arabs called it 'Umm al-Dunya', the Mother of the World, and the title is no exaggeration. Here is the largest museum on the planet devoted to a single civilisation, the brand-new Grand Egyptian Museum, opened in 2025 at the foot of the pyramids, and here, too, is the legendary Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, with its century-old galleries. But Cairo is not just an archaeological site: it is a living city, where people drink mint tea in old-time cafés, haggle in Khan el-Khalili, eat koshari on the street and sail the Nile in a felucca as the sun sets behind the palm trees.
This guide explores Cairo with a practical, warm eye: how to plan your visit to Giza and the two great museums, how to get around a city of twenty million people without losing your patience, where to eat well and cheaply, how baksheesh works (tips, which are everywhere in Egypt) and how to use the capital as a base to see the rest of the country. Cairo rewards the curious, patient traveller: around every corner there is a piece of human history.
Cairo, as we know it, is an Arab, medieval city, much younger than the pyramids that surround it. But the site has been inhabited for millennia: a few kilometres to the south lay Memphis, the first capital of unified Egypt, around 3100 BC, and on the Giza plateau the pharaohs of the 4th dynasty raised their pyramids around 2560 BC. In Roman times the fortress of Babylon stood here, the core of today's Coptic Cairo. The city proper was born with the Arab conquest: in 641 the general Amr ibn al-As founded Fustat, and in 969 the Shia Fatimid dynasty founded Al-Qahira, 'the victorious', which gave the city its name. Under the Ayyubids of Saladin, who built the Citadel in the 12th century, and above all under the Mamluks (1250-1517), Cairo enjoyed a golden age and filled with mosques, madrasas and markets that still survive in the Islamic quarter. It was an Ottoman province for almost four centuries, went through Napoleon's short-lived occupation (1798) and, under Muhammad Ali and his successors in the 19th century, was modernised with European-style boulevards. In the 20th century it was the heart of Arab nationalism: Gamal Abdel Nasser governed from here after the 1952 revolution, and here, in Tahrir Square, the 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak broke out. 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.
Cairo as we know it today is an Arab, medieval city, surprisingly young when compared with the pyramids that watch over it from the desert. But the place where it stands has been inhabited by humans since the dawn of civilisation. A few kilometres to the south lay Memphis, capital of unified Egypt from the time of the legendary pharaoh Narmer, around 3100 BC, and the great centre of power of the Old Kingdom. And on the Giza plateau, on the western edge of today's city, the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty —Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure— raised their pyramids around 2560 BC: monumental tombs that would become the only one of the seven wonders of the ancient world to survive to our day.
For millennia the area was a strategic crossroads, sitting exactly where the narrow, fertile Nile valley opens into the great fan of the delta and controlling the passage between Upper and Lower Egypt. Greeks and Romans ruled Egypt after the fall of the Ptolemaic dynasty and the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC. In Roman times, the Fortress of Babylon of Egypt rose on the east bank of the Nile, a military stronghold whose towers still survive in today's Coptic Cairo district. Around that fortress an important Christian community flourished: the Copts, heirs to Egyptian Christianity, who built some of the oldest churches in the country here.
When the Arab armies reached Egypt in the 7th century, they found a rich, Christian land where Coptic and Greek were spoken, governed from distant Alexandria. The story of the city we now call Cairo was about to begin, but on foundations that were already thousands of years old.
The city proper was born with the Arab conquest of Egypt. In 641, General Amr ibn al-As, sent by Caliph Umar, took the Fortress of Babylon and founded beside it the military camp of Fustat, which soon became a thriving city and the capital of Muslim Egypt. There he built the Mosque of Amr ibn al-As, the first mosque in Egypt and on the whole African continent, a milestone in the history of Islam. Fustat grew for three centuries as a great commercial and administrative centre, while Egypt passed from one set of Muslim rulers to another.
Cairo got its own name in 969, when the Shia Fatimid dynasty, coming from present-day Tunisia, conquered Egypt. Their commander, Jawhar al-Siqilli, founded a new walled palace city north of Fustat, meant to be the capital of the Fatimid caliphate and a rival to Baghdad. They called it Al-Qahira, 'the victorious' (the origin, via Italian, of the name 'Cairo'). In 970 the Al-Azhar Mosque was built in this Fatimid city, and it soon became one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the Islamic world, a beacon of learning that still operates today.
Under the Fatimids, Cairo established itself as one of the great cities of the medieval Mediterranean: rich, cosmopolitan, with a flourishing trade linking the Indian Ocean to Europe. The city of the caliphs, with its palaces and great monumental gates —Bab Zuweila, Bab al-Futuh and Bab al-Nasr, which still stand— laid the foundations of the great Islamic Cairo that would amaze travellers in the centuries that followed.
In 1171 the legendary Saladin (Salah ad-Din) brought the Fatimid caliphate to an end and founded the Ayyubid dynasty, returning Egypt to Sunni orthodoxy. Saladin, the great adversary of the Crusaders who would retake Jerusalem in 1187, left his most visible mark on Cairo in the Citadel, the imposing fortress he had built on a hill to defend the city and unite its separate settlements, and which would be the seat of Egyptian power for almost seven hundred years. He also surrounded the city with new walls, bringing Fustat and Al-Qahira together.
But the true golden age came with the Mamluks, a caste of slave soldiers of Turkic and Circassian origin who seized power in 1250 and ruled Egypt until 1517. Under the Mamluk sultans, who halted the Mongols and drove out the last Crusaders, Cairo became the largest, richest and most splendid city in the Islamic world, and one of the biggest on the planet outside China. Wealth from the spice trade between the East and Europe funded an unmatched building boom: monumental mosques, madrasas (Quranic schools), mausoleums, hospitals, caravanserais and sabils (public fountains) went up all over the city. Al-Muizz Street, now a World Heritage Site, holds one of the densest concentrations of medieval Islamic architecture in the world, with masterpieces such as the Sultan Qalawun complex and the Mosque of Sultan Hassan.
It was in this period, in the 14th century, that the Khan el-Khalili bazaar began operating as the city's great market. Mamluk Cairo dazzled travellers such as Ibn Battuta, who described it as a boundless metropolis. That medieval heritage, with its thousand minarets, is still the soul of the old city today.
In 1517 the Ottoman sultan Selim I conquered Egypt, and Cairo became a province of the vast Ottoman Empire, governed by a pasha sent from Istanbul, although the Mamluks kept much of the real power. For almost three centuries the city lost the imperial-capital status it had once held, but it remained one of the great cities of the Muslim world, a religious and commercial centre of the first rank, with Al-Azhar as a beacon of Islamic learning.
A brief but decisive episode shook the city at the end of the 18th century: in 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt and took Cairo after the Battle of the Pyramids. The French occupation lasted barely three years, but it brought with it a legion of scholars and scientists whose monumental 'Description de l'Égypte' and, above all, the discovery of the Rosetta Stone —which would allow Champollion to decipher hieroglyphs in 1822— launched modern Egyptology and awakened in Europe a fascination with ancient Egypt that has never faded.
After the French left, an Albanian-born officer in Ottoman service, Muhammad Ali, took power in 1805 and became the founder of modern Egypt. In 1811 he wiped out Mamluk power in a single stroke (the notorious Citadel massacre) and launched an ambitious modernisation of the country: army, industry, agriculture and education on the European model. On the Citadel he built his great alabaster mosque, which still dominates Cairo's skyline. His successors, the khedives, carried on modernising the capital: under Ismail, in the late 19th century, Parisian-style boulevards, squares and buildings were laid out in the new centre (Downtown), and in 1869 the Suez Canal was opened. But the debts run up on these projects led to bankruptcy and, in 1882, to the British occupation of Egypt.
The 20th century made Cairo the political and cultural heart of the Arab world. After decades of British occupation and an increasingly discredited monarchy, on 23 July 1952 a group of army officers, the 'Free Officers', staged a coup that overthrew King Farouk and proclaimed a republic. From that movement emerged Gamal Abdel Nasser, president from 1954, who became the great leader of Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism. From Cairo, Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956 —sparking an international crisis—, drove the construction of the Aswan High Dam and projected Egypt as a Third World power. The city grew explosively, drawing millions of people from the countryside.
Under his successors, Anwar el-Sadat —who signed peace with Israel in 1979 and was assassinated in 1981— and Hosni Mubarak, who ruled with an iron hand for almost thirty years, Cairo turned into a megacity of colossal size, with often chaotic growth, huge informal neighbourhoods and chronic problems with traffic, pollution and housing, but also with a tireless energy and cultural life.
The big event of the new century came in January and February 2011: in Tahrir Square, right in the centre, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated for eighteen days as part of the Arab Spring, in protests that forced Mubarak to resign after almost three decades in power. Tahrir Square became a worldwide symbol of that wave of uprisings. The following years were turbulent, with the brief presidency of Mohamed Morsi and the rise to power of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Today Egypt is building a new administrative capital in the desert east of Cairo, while the old Mother of the World —with its Grand Egyptian Museum, opened in 2025 at the foot of the pyramids— remains one of the most fascinating and history-laden cities on the planet.
