Explore Egypt

Cairo

Egypt's sprawling capital pairs the Giza Plateau — home to the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx, and the new Grand Egyptian Museum — with a medieval Islamic quarter that the UNESCO designation of Historic Cairo barely does justice to. The Khan el-Khalili bazaar, the Citadel of Saladin, and the City of the Dead offer days of exploration at street level, while the Nile corniche rewards an evening stroll.

Luxor

Built on the ruins of ancient Thebes, Luxor is the world's greatest open-air museum, with more ancient monuments concentrated here than anywhere else on earth. The East Bank holds Karnak Temple's epic colonnade and Luxor Temple floodlit at night; cross the Nile to the West Bank and the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, and the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut await.

Aswan

The southernmost city on the Egyptian Nile combines a slower pace than Cairo or Luxor with extraordinary monuments — Philae Temple rising from its island in Lake Nasser, the unfinished obelisk in its granite quarry, and the majestic Abu Simbel temples a short flight south. Nubian villages on the west bank and a felucca sunset over Elephantine Island make Aswan the most romantic stop on the Nile.

Hurghada

Egypt's longest-established Red Sea resort town has evolved from a fishing village into a dive-and-beach hub, with some of the clearest warm water in the world just minutes from the shore. The house reef at Giftun Island Marine Park is accessible by day boat, while liveaboard trips departing Hurghada reach the legendary Brothers Islands and Elphinstone Reef.

Alexandria

The Mediterranean city Alexander the Great founded in 331 BCE reimagined itself in the modern era with the spectacular Bibliotheca Alexandrina — an enormous contemporary library on the waterfront, built beside the ancient wonder. The Greek-Roman Museum, the Catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa, and the atmospheric tram rides through Italianate colonial streets make Alexandria unlike anywhere else in Egypt.

Dahab

A former Bedouin fishing village on the Sinai coast, Dahab has grown into one of the world's premier backpacker dive destinations — the Blue Hole is one of the most famous (and most dangerous) dive sites on the planet. The town's laid-back waterfront strip of rooftop restaurants and dive schools faces the Arabian Peninsula mountains across the Gulf of Aqaba.

Abu Simbel

Cut from a sandstone cliff above Lake Nasser in the 13th century BCE and relocated in one of history's greatest engineering feats to save them from the rising lake, the twin temples of Abu Simbel are among the most dramatically sited monuments in the world. Ramesses II's four colossal seated statues watch the sunrise twice a year on his birth and coronation dates — drawing crowds from around the world.

Siwa Oasis

Deep in the Western Desert near the Libyan border, the Siwa Oasis is one of Egypt's most remote and atmospheric destinations, where mud-brick architecture, salt lakes, and date palms create a landscape unlike anywhere else in the country. Alexander the Great consulted the Oracle of Ammon here in 331 BCE, and the temple ruins of Amun still rise above the main town of Shali.

El Gouna

A purpose-built resort town 25 km north of Hurghada, El Gouna is Egypt's most polished and pedestrian-friendly beach destination, built around a network of lagoons and islands connected by water taxis and small bridges. It has a genuine town feel with restaurants, kitesurfing schools, and a film festival, making it a preferred base for travellers who want Red Sea access without Hurghada's crowds.

Marsa Alam

The quieter southern stretch of Egypt's Red Sea coast draws serious divers to sites like Elphinstone Reef and the sea turtle nesting grounds at Abu Dabbab — one of the few places in the world where you can swim with dugongs. The lack of mass tourism makes Marsa Alam one of Egypt's most pleasant beach destinations for travellers seeking calm over buzz.

Fayoum

Egypt's largest oasis, the Fayoum sits in a natural depression south of Cairo and rewards day-trippers and slow travellers alike with the birding sanctuary at Lake Qarun, the spectacular desert landscape of Wadi El Rayan, and Wadi Al-Hitan — the UNESCO-listed Whale Valley where 40-million-year-old fossils of prehistoric whales emerge from the rock. The medieval waterwheel town of Madinet Madi is rarely visited.

Edfu

The Temple of Horus at Edfu, built between 237 and 57 BCE, is the best-preserved ancient temple in Egypt — its massive pylons and inner sanctum survive almost intact, giving visitors the most complete picture of a functioning pharaonic temple anywhere in the Nile Valley. Most travellers arrive on Nile cruises between Luxor and Aswan, but the temple deserves more than a rushed hour.

Kom Ombo

The double temple at Kom Ombo is unique in Egypt — two temples sharing one axis, one dedicated to the crocodile god Sobek and one to the falcon god Haroeris, their symmetrical plan creating an eerie mirror architecture. The adjacent Crocodile Museum houses dozens of mummified crocodiles, and the riverside setting is at its best at sunset when Nile cruise boats dock at the quay.

Minya

The capital of Middle Egypt is rarely on tourist itineraries but anchors some of the most underrated antiquity sites in the country — Beni Hasan's rock-cut Old Kingdom tombs, Tell el-Amarna where the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten built his short-lived capital, and Tuna el-Gebel's extensive Greco-Roman necropolis. The city itself has a quiet colonial charm and excellent local street food.

Port Said

Guarding the Mediterranean entrance to the Suez Canal, Port Said was founded in 1859 when canal construction began and retains a distinctive early colonial character, with wide shaded arcades and a famous duty-free zone. The Canal Authority Museum and the waterfront promenade overlooking the canal — where container ships the size of apartment blocks glide past at eye level — make for a memorable afternoon.

Sharm el-Sheikh

The tip of the Sinai Peninsula has built one of the Middle East's most-visited international resort clusters around world-class diving — Ras Mohammed National Park, the Tiran Strait reefs, and the Blue Hole at nearby Dahab are all within day-trip reach. Check current UK and US government travel advice for Sinai before visiting, as parts of the peninsula carry heightened security advisories.

White Desert

Egypt's most surreal landscape lies in the Western Desert near the town of Farafra — a moonscape of chalk-white formations sculpted by wind erosion into mushrooms, icebergs, and abstract shapes that glow golden at sunrise and electric white under the moon. Overnight camping in the White Desert, reached by 4WD from Cairo, is one of Egypt's most extraordinary experiences.

Ismailia

Midway along the Suez Canal, Ismailia has the most leafy and European atmosphere of any Egyptian city, reflecting its origins as the administrative headquarters of the original canal company. The Ferdinand de Lesseps house and the Ismailia Museum — holding artefacts from ancient times through the canal's construction — are the main draws, alongside the quiet fishing lake of Lake Timsah.

Inscribed in 1979, this site encompasses the world's most famous ancient monuments — the Great Pyramid of Giza, the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World, alongside the Sphinx, the Step Pyramid of Saqqara, and the Bent and Red Pyramids of Dahshur. Together they represent the supreme expression of Old Kingdom funerary architecture and span over a thousand years of pharaonic pyramid-building.

Inscribed in 1979, Ancient Thebes encompasses modern-day Luxor on both banks of the Nile — on the east, the temple complexes of Karnak and Luxor; on the west, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the Colossi of Memnon, and the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut. The site is the most concentrated collection of ancient monuments in the world, covering over 3,000 years of Egyptian civilisation.

Inscribed in 1979, this site stretches along the Nile from the iconic twin temples of Abu Simbel — carved from living rock by Ramesses II — north to the Ptolemaic island temple of Philae. Many of the monuments were physically relocated in the 1960s during one of history's largest archaeological rescue operations to save them from the rising waters of Lake Nasser behind the Aswan High Dam.

Inscribed in 1979, Historic Cairo is one of the world's oldest Islamic cities, its dense medieval urban fabric containing some of the finest Islamic architecture anywhere — the Al-Azhar Mosque (970 CE), the Ibn Tulun Mosque (879 CE), the Citadel of Saladin, and the Khan el-Khalili bazaar. The site contains over 600 listed monuments spanning the Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods.

Inscribed in 1979, Abu Mena is an early Christian holy city built over the tomb of the soldier-martyr Saint Menas, who died in 296 CE, and became one of the great pilgrimage centres of the Byzantine world. The site, in the Western Desert near Alexandria, is on UNESCO's List of World Heritage in Danger due to agricultural irrigation causing the ground to sink and destabilise the ancient structures.

Inscribed in 2002, the Saint Catherine Area encompasses the oldest continuously operating Christian monastery in the world — Saint Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, founded in the 6th century by Emperor Justinian. The monastery's library holds the world's second-largest collection of early Christian manuscripts after the Vatican, and the surrounding Sinai landscape holds profound religious significance for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Inscribed in 2005 in the Western Desert of the Fayoum, Wadi Al-Hitan contains an extraordinary concentration of fossils of ancient whales — the archaeoceti — that document the evolutionary transition of cetaceans from land mammals to ocean creatures. The fossils lie on the desert surface, exposed by wind erosion over millennia, and include complete skeletons with the vestigial hind limbs that mark the transition between worlds.