Cairo

Five thousand pieces from the tomb of Tutankhamun fill one floor. Some cases still carry the old handwritten labels.

A market running since the fourteenth century divides into lanes for goldsmiths and for spice. When a price is named, custom starts the bargaining at half of it.

Inside the hilltop fortress a mosque carries a silver dome. From the wall the pyramids show faintly beyond the city.

Churches and a synagogue sit close along narrow lanes on the site of a Roman fort. The hanging church rests on an old gate and part of its floor is glass.

Built in 876, it survives closer to its original form than any other in the city. A minaret whose stair winds around the outside is climbed for the courtyard below.

A hill of accumulated rubbish was cleared and laid out as a garden. A twelfth century wall uncovered in the digging stands exposed along one edge.

A wooden boat under a triangular sail is hired for a run along the river. With no engine, a windless hour leaves it nearly still.

It is reckoned to hold the densest run of medieval Islamic buildings on one street. Lit after dark, shadows pick the carving out of the stone.

Tombs here were built like houses and living families occupy them. Mamluk mausoleum domes rise among the rows.

A royal built this residence with each room decorated in a different national style. Tropical trees planted in the garden now throw a heavy shade.

Badly damaged in 2014 by a bomb aimed at the police headquarters opposite, it reopened in 2017. Enamelled glass mosque lamps from the Mamluk era fill a single room. The building faces Bab el Khalq square, within walking distance of Khan el Khalili.

In April 2021 twenty-two royal mummies were carried here in a procession from the old museum on Tahrir Square. The mummy hall sits apart underground with the lighting kept low. Being beside the Fustat ruins, it looks down over Ain el Sira lake behind.

Built as mosque and college by a Mamluk sultan in the fourteenth century; each of the four iwans around its court taught one of the four schools of Islamic law. The entrance portal dwarfs visitors. The Citadel hill rises just above, and one walk covers both.

Facing Sultan Hassan across a single street, this mosque was completed in 1912. Egypt's last king, Farouk, and the last Shah of Iran both lie buried inside. It looks medieval, but the columns and gilded ceilings are twentieth-century work.

Founded by the Fatimids in the 970s, its teaching carried on to become today's Al Azhar University. You carry your shoes into the white marble court, and women must cover their hair. At sunset the stone floor of the court turns pink.

Two Ottoman-era houses joined into one, kept as furnished by Gayer-Anderson, the British army doctor who lived and collected here. Rooms behind wooden mashrabiya screens overlook the court. The Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me was shot here.

The church of St Simon's monastery, hollowed out of the Mokattam cliff. The way in passes through the quarter of the Zabbaleen, who collect and sort the city's rubbish, with sacks stacked outside each house. Bible scenes are carved large into the cliff face.

A stepped shaft built by the Abbasids in the ninth century, where marks on a central marble column measured the Nile flood. The year's taxes were set by that height. It stands where Roda Island ends to the south; look for its conical roof.

A mansion modelled on a Hindu temple, built in the early 1900s by Baron Empain, the Belgian who founded the new town of Heliopolis. Empty for decades, it reopened restored in 2020. A separate roof ticket takes you up beside the carved towers.

A 187m concrete tower raised on Gezira Island in 1961 and wrapped in a lotus-pattern lattice. The top deck takes in the whole city, and when the air is clean, the Giza pyramids too. Sunset draws the biggest crowd, so the lift queue grows long.

A fourteenth-century Mamluk mosque named for the wall of blue floral tiles added in the seventeenth century. Restoration in the Darb el Ahmar quarter finished and it reopened in 2015. It lies midway on the walk from Bab Zuweila toward the Citadel.

The site of the first mosque built in Egypt after the Arab army arrived in 641. Repeated rebuilding has erased the original, but the broad prayer hall with its forest of columns remains. From the Coptic Quarter, walk a few minutes north.

The bridge linking Tahrir Square to Gezira Island, with four bronze lions sitting at its ends. Evenings bring couples and families to the railings and carts roasting corn. Lit pleasure boats slide beneath the deck.