Behind the mountains on the west bank of Luxor, in a desert valley where nothing grows and the silence is total, lies one of the most extraordinary places on the planet: the Valley of the Kings. Here, for almost five centuries, the most powerful pharaohs in Egyptian history, those of the New Kingdom, chose to be buried. They had their tombs dug in secret deep into the rock, hoping to outwit the robbers and reach eternal life. It is the most famous royal necropolis in the world.
What awaits visitors underground is astonishing. The tombs are long corridors sloping down into the gloom, their walls and ceilings covered from top to bottom in hieroglyphs and painted scenes of incredible beauty and vividness: gold-skinned gods, pharaohs before Osiris, journeys through the underworld, skies filled with stars and goddesses with outstretched wings. These colours are more than three thousand years old, yet, kept from the light in the darkness of the rock, they look freshly applied. It was here, in one of these tombs, that Howard Carter found the fabulous treasure of Tutankhamun intact in 1922.
This guide takes a practical look at the Valley of the Kings: how admission works (it includes three tombs of your choice), which tombs are the most spectacular and which cost extra, how to get there from Luxor across the Nile, how to avoid the extreme heat and the crowds, and which other treasures on the bank of the dead are worth adding. Going down into these tombs gives you a glimpse of how the Egyptians imagined eternity.
The Valley of the Kings was the royal necropolis of the New Kingdom pharaohs (18th to 20th dynasties, 16th-11th centuries BC), Egypt's most glorious era, when the capital was Thebes (present-day Luxor). After centuries of looted pyramids, the kings did the opposite: they built hidden, unmarked tombs cut into the rock of a remote valley overlooked by a peak with a natural pyramid shape (El-Qurn), to protect them from plunder. More than sixty pharaohs and other figures were buried here, among them Thutmose III, Amenhotep II, Hatshepsut, Seti I, Ramesses II, Ramesses VI and the young Tutankhamun. The tombs were decorated with funerary texts (the Book of the Dead, the Book of Gates, the Amduat) and scenes to guide the king on his journey to the afterlife. Despite the secrecy, almost all of them were robbed in ancient times. The great exception was Tutankhamun's, found intact in 1922. The valley was abandoned at the end of the New Kingdom, visited by Greek and Roman tourists and rediscovered by modern Egyptology. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Upper Egypt of great temples and royal tombs: Thebes (Luxor), Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, Aswan, Philae and Abu Simbel, linked by the classic Nile cruise.
Read the history of The Nile Valley: Luxor and Aswan →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 15 activities in Luxor. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
During the Old Kingdom, the pharaohs had themselves buried beneath artificial mountains visible from miles away: the pyramids. They were monuments of eternal propaganda, meant to proclaim the king's power and guarantee his ascent to the heavens. But they had a fatal flaw: everyone knew where the treasure was. Despite false corridors, trap chambers and granite blocks, every one of the great pyramids was plundered, some just a few generations after they were built. By the time the New Kingdom arrived, a thousand years later, the pharaohs had learned their lesson.
The kings of the 18th Dynasty, who ruled from Thebes (modern Luxor), made a radical decision: give up the visibility of the pyramids and bet on the opposite, absolute secrecy. Instead of announcing their tombs, they would hide them. To do so they chose an exceptional spot on the west bank of the Nile, the bank of the dead: a remote desert valley, hemmed in by cliffs and reachable only along a narrow path that was easy to guard. And, as if to crown the landscape, the valley was overlooked by El-Qurn, a natural mountain with a perfect pyramid shape. It was as if nature had built the pyramid the pharaohs no longer wanted to raise: beneath its sacred shadow, and hidden in the rock, the kings would seek eternity.
The first to adopt the new custom is believed to have been Thutmose I, around 1500 BC. From then on, for almost five centuries, the pharaohs would dig their tombs here in secret, entrusting the work to a closed community of craftsmen who lived in isolation to protect the location. The Valley of the Kings was born.
For almost five centuries, from the 16th to the 11th century BC, the great pharaohs of the New Kingdom were buried in the Valley of the Kings. The list is a parade of the most powerful names in Egyptian history: Thutmose I, III and IV; Amenhotep II and III; Hatshepsut, the queen who reigned as pharaoh; the young Tutankhamun; the warriors Seti I and his son Ramesses II, the greatest and longest-lived of them all; Ramesses III, who held back the Sea Peoples; and a long line of Ramesses down to the end of the 20th Dynasty. More than sixty tombs have been identified, along with numerous smaller chambers and pits.
The tombs evolved over time, but they followed a common plan: an entrance cut into the hillside, followed by a series of corridors and stairways descending in a straight or angled line into the depths, sometimes passing shafts (meant to divert water from the rare flash floods and to throw robbers off the scent), until reaching the burial chamber, where the king's sarcophagus lay surrounded by his grave goods. Every inch of the walls and ceilings was covered in religious decoration.
That decoration was not ornamental but deeply functional in the Egyptian mindset: it was a magical manual for eternal life. Texts such as the Amduat ('what is in the underworld'), the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns and the Litany of Ra described, hour by hour, the perilous night journey of the sun — and of the dead pharaoh, identified with it — through the underworld, until its rebirth at dawn. Scenes of the king before Osiris, Anubis, Hathor and the other gods, and magnificent astronomical ceilings showing the goddess Nut and the stars, completed a programme designed to ensure the pharaoh's resurrection and his eternal union with the gods.
Behind the wonders of the valley lies a fascinating human story: that of the men and women who made them possible. The royal tombs were dug and decorated by a specialised community of craftsmen — stonecutters, draughtsmen, painters, sculptors — who lived in their own village, cut off from everyone else, at Deir el-Medina, precisely to keep the location and the treasures secret. For generations, these workers passed the trade down from father to son and served pharaoh after pharaoh.
Thanks to the extraordinary preservation of their records — thousands of ostraca, fragments of stone and pottery bearing notes — we know more about the daily life of this workers' village than about almost any other in the ancient world. We know their wages (paid in grain, oil and fish), their work shifts, their houses, their lawsuits, their beliefs and even their personal dramas. This is the source of one of the most astonishing facts in labour history: around 1150 BC, under Ramesses III, the workers of Deir el-Medina, fed up with their rations arriving late, put down their tools and protested — the first documented strike in human history.
But neither secrecy nor isolation saved the tombs from the fate their kings had feared so much. Already during the New Kingdom itself, and above all in the time of crisis that followed, looting became widespread, sometimes with the complicity of the very guards and officials. Surviving papyri record royal trials of gangs of tomb robbers. Faced with the plundering, the priests at the end of the New Kingdom took a desperate step: they removed the mummies of the great pharaohs from their violated tombs and gathered them in secret hiding places to protect them. That is why, centuries later, dozens of royal mummies — Seti I, Ramesses II and many more — would be found piled together in two caches, far from their original burials.
At the start of the 20th century, many Egyptologists considered the Valley of the Kings exhausted: they thought there was nothing important left to find. But a British archaeologist, Howard Carter, was convinced otherwise. Funded by an aristocratic patron, Lord Carnarvon, Carter spent years searching, with growing frustration, for the tomb of an almost forgotten pharaoh about whom hardly anything was known: Tutankhamun. In 1922, just as Carnarvon was about to pull the funding, Carter's team found a step cut into the rock. It was the beginning of a staircase leading down to an intact sealed doorway.
On 26 November 1922, Carter made a small hole in the door, held a candle inside and looked in. Carnarvon, impatient, asked him whether he could see anything. Carter's reply became legendary: 'Yes, wonderful things'. Before his eyes glittered the gold of a treasure that had stayed hidden for more than three thousand years. The tomb, though small and modest for a king, was the only one in the valley to have survived practically intact, with its more than five thousand objects: thrones, chariots, beds, statues, jewellery and, above all, the sarcophagi nested one inside the other and the dazzling solid-gold funerary mask, today one of the most famous objects in the world.
The discovery was a global sensation that unleashed 'Egyptomania': a craze for all things Egyptian that swept through the fashion, art, cinema and design of the 1920s. Lord Carnarvon's death from an infection a few months later fuelled the legend of the 'curse of the pharaoh', a myth with no scientific basis but enormous success in the press. Tutankhamun, a minor king who died at eighteen, became — through the quirk of having escaped the robbers' notice — the most famous pharaoh in history.
Since 1979, the Valley of the Kings has been part of 'Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis', inscribed by UNESCO on the World Heritage List. It is one of the most visited and studied archaeological sites on the planet, and excavations continue: in 2005 KV63 was found, the first new tomb discovered in the valley since Tutankhamun's, and in recent years further tombs and finds have been located in the area, proof that the valley has not yet had its final say.
But success brings serious conservation problems. Paintings that survived for millennia in the half-light are now threatened by mass tourism: the humidity from the breath and sweat of thousands of people, rubbing, carbon dioxide and temperature changes all damage the pigments and encourage fungi and salts. To protect them, the authorities have taken several measures: rotating which tombs are open to the public (so that none receives visitors non-stop), limiting numbers, installing walkways and glass screens, banning flash, and closing the most fragile tombs entirely or building exact replicas (such as the one made of Tutankhamun's tomb).
Today, visiting the Valley of the Kings calls for a balance between the legitimate wish to glimpse these wonders and the responsibility to preserve them for the future. Travellers can do their part by following the rules: don't touch the walls, don't use flash, stay on the walkways and move carefully. Going down into these tombs, in the silence and half-light of the rock, before scenes painted more than three thousand years ago to guide a king through the afterlife, remains one of the most profound experiences a traveller can have: a direct encounter with the way one of history's great civilisations imagined eternal life.
