Museum · Giza
Grand Egyptian Museum
The new museum by the pyramids, fully opened in November 2025, with the complete Tutankhamun treasures and a monumental staircase lined with statues.
Look for: The colossal Ramesses II in the atrium.
Book ahead
Go further, look closer.
Cities · Africa · 30°02′N 31°14′E
Cairo
Five thousand years of art in one city, and a young contemporary scene that works in the downtown buildings of the old belle époque.
Best monthsOctober–April
Art calendarArt d'Égypte (autumn, contemporary art in historic sites) · Cairo Biennale
This guide4 essentials · 6 places off-piste
Essentials
Museum · Tahrir Square
Egyptian Museum
The pink museum of 1902, still dense with antiquities. Less polished than the new one, and still essential.
Look for: The Narmer Palette and the Fayum portraits.
Daily
Museum · Bab al-Khalq
Museum of Islamic Art
One of the world's greatest collections of Islamic art: Mamluk lamps, woodwork, ceramics.
Look for: The mosque lamps.
Daily
Museum · Old Cairo
Coptic Museum
Coptic art in a building of mashrabiya screens, beside the Hanging Church.
Look for: The textiles.
Daily
Off the list
Off-Piste in Cairo
Rooms, ruins and curiosities: the city's other museum.
Artist house · Sayeda Zeinab
Gayer-Anderson Museum
Two 16th- and 17th-century houses joined together and filled with the collections of a British army doctor. It appears in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.
The rooftop.
Mosque · Sayeda Zeinab
Mosque of Ibn Tulun
A vast 9th-century mosque with an external spiral minaret.
Climb the minaret.
Architecture · Heliopolis
Baron Empain Palace
A Belgian industrialist's Hindu-temple palace of 1911, restored and reopened in 2020.
The carvings.
Workshop · Harraniya, Giza
Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Centre
Weaving workshops founded in 1952 by the architect Ramses Wissa Wassef. Village children were taught to weave tapestries of their own invention, with no drawings, and two generations later their families still do. Mud-brick domes and gardens, a few minutes from the pyramids.
Watch the weavers at the looms, then the museum.
Museum · Gezira
Mahmoud Mokhtar Museum
The father of modern Egyptian sculpture, in a 1962 building by Ramses Wissa Wassef, with Mokhtar's tomb in the basement.
The plaster models for Egypt's Awakening.
Architecture · Gezira
Cairo Tower
A 187-metre lattice of concrete shaped like a lotus (1961). It was said to have been built with money the Americans offered Nasser, as a monument to his refusal.
Go up at sunset for the Nile and, on clear days, the pyramids.
Nearby
Saqqara
The Step Pyramid, about 40 minutes away.
Alexandria
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, about three hours by train.
If you have one day
Egyptian Museum at opening → lunch downtown → Ibn Tulun and the Gayer-Anderson Museum → Al-Muizz Street at dusk.