Alexandria, Egypt: What Is Left of the Ancient City

Is Alexandria, Egypt, worth visiting?

It depends on what you came to Egypt for. If you have seven days and you have not seen Luxor or Aswan, go there first — the pharaonic sites are stronger, and Alexandria will still be here. If you have ten days or more, or you have done the Nile before, the city earns a night or two. It is a change of register: sea air, Greek and Roman history instead of pharaonic, and a normal Egyptian city getting on with its day rather than a tourist strip.

Be clear about what it is not. It is not a beach holiday. The city beaches are narrow, busy and hemmed in by the Corniche traffic, and the sea is not the reason to come. Nor is it a place where you walk among ancient ruins. Most of the ancient stone is under the modern streets or under the harbour.

A short history: from Alexander to Egypt's second city

Alexander the Great founded the city in 331 BC, at the very end of the pharaonic era, and it was Greek from the start. After his death it became the capital of the Ptolemies, the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt for the best part of three centuries and ended with Cleopatra, the last of the line. That is the first thing to fix in your head: Alexandria is not a pharaonic city that happens to sit on the coast. Its story is Greek, then Roman, then Byzantine, then Ottoman, then modern, and the pharaohs barely feature.

Under the Ptolemies and then Rome it was one of the great cities of the ancient Mediterranean — a port, a centre of learning, and the seat of the famous library. That version of Alexandria is essentially gone. What ended it was not a single catastrophe but centuries of decline: sieges, earthquakes, the loss of status once Rome and later Constantinople mattered more, and the slow silting and rebuilding that buries an old city under a living one. The ancient street plan lies beneath the modern grid and, in places, beneath the harbour.

The city you walk today is largely a nineteenth- and twentieth-century one, built when Alexandria was a cosmopolitan trading port with large Greek, Italian and other foreign communities. That is where the faded European facades downtown come from, and the old Greek and Italian cafés, and the flat kept as a museum for the Greek-Alexandrian poet Cavafy. Today it is a working city of roughly five million people, Egypt's second, and it feels like a different country from Cairo: sea air, wetter winters, and a pace of its own.

What happened to the Library of Alexandria?

The Library of Alexandria was not burned down in one night. It declined over centuries: fire during Caesar's siege in 48 BC, the loss of royal funding, the slow drift of scholars elsewhere, and the general unravelling of the city under Roman rule. By late antiquity it had stopped functioning. No one can point to a single villain, and no one can point to the building either. Nothing of it survives, and its exact site is not known.

What you can visit is the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, opened in 2002 on the Corniche at Shatby, near where the ancient royal quarter stood. It is a working library and cultural centre, not a reconstruction. The reading room is the point: a huge tilted disc of a building, stepped floors, light coming in through the angled roof. There are small museums inside, including antiquities and manuscripts. An hour is enough unless you like libraries, in which case take two.

Manage the expectation before you arrive, because this is where people are most often let down. The modern library takes the name and the site's associations, but it holds none of the ancient collection — there is nothing to hold, since that was lost long ago. Read as a piece of contemporary civic architecture and a genuine research institution it is impressive. Read as a window onto the ancient library it is a name and little else, and visitors who came for the second thing tend to leave flat.

What is actually left to see?

Qaitbay Citadel sits at the western tip of the eastern harbour, on the site of the Pharos lighthouse. The fort was built in the 1470s for Sultan Qaitbay, and stone from the collapsed lighthouse was reused in it. Inside it is fairly bare; the reason to go is the position and the view back along the Corniche. Pompey's Pillar, inland, has nothing to do with Pompey — it was raised for the emperor Diocletian around AD 298, and takes twenty minutes.

The catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa are the strongest single site. A spiral staircase drops you into a second-century AD tomb complex where Egyptian, Greek and Roman carving share the same walls, including Anubis in a Roman soldier's uniform. The lowest level is usually flooded. Nearby, Kom el-Dikka has a small Roman theatre and bath house. The Graeco-Roman Museum, reopened in 2023 after a long closure, holds the best of what has been dug out of the city.

The rest is atmosphere rather than monuments: the curve of the Corniche at dusk, the old Greek and Italian cafés downtown, the fish laid out on ice at Anfoushi, the poet Cavafy's flat kept as a small museum. Some people find that thin. Others find it the best day of their trip.

The Pharos lighthouse and Qaitbay Citadel

The one ancient thing everyone has heard of is the lighthouse. The Pharos of Alexandria stood at the entrance to the harbour and was counted among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Like the library, it is gone. It came down over centuries, earthquakes among the causes, and by the time Sultan Qaitbay built his fort on the spot in the 1470s there was fallen stone lying about to reuse in the walls. That is the honest state of it: no lighthouse to see, only the place where one stood and a medieval fort partly made of its rubble.

That is still worth something. Qaitbay Citadel occupies the exact tip of land where the wonder once was, and standing on it you are looking out over the harbour mouth the lighthouse guided ships through. The fort itself is largely empty inside, so do not go expecting rooms full of exhibits. Go for the setting: the sea on three sides, the sweep of the Corniche curving away, and the sense of the harbour as the thing the whole city was built around. On a clear, breezy afternoon it is the best view in Alexandria.

Treat it as a short visit rather than a half-day. Half an hour to walk the ramparts and take in the position is about right for most people, longer if the light is good and you want to sit with it. Combined with a slow stretch of the Corniche and a look at the fishing boats below, the western end of the harbour makes an easy couple of hours that costs you nothing in stamina — a useful counterweight to the stairs at the catacombs.

The sunken city beneath the harbour

When people say the ancient city is under the harbour, they mean it literally. Remains of the old royal quarter and of the lighthouse lie in shallow water in the eastern harbour, close to shore. This is where a good deal of what survives actually is — not on display in the open air, but on the seabed, and some of it has been raised. A number of the sphinxes and reused blocks you see around the city, and pieces now in the museum, came up out of that water rather than out of the ground.

You can dive on the submerged remains with a certified operator, and the right expectation to carry is a modest one. The eastern harbour is silted and shallow, visibility is often only a metre or two, and whether a dive runs at all depends on the weather that day. Divers with a specific interest in the archaeology tend to enjoy it for what it is. Most visitors get more from the pieces that have been lifted out and cleaned up, where you can actually see what you are looking at.

It ties the whole city together, though, and it is worth understanding rather than just diving. Alexandria disappoints people who arrive expecting ruins because its ruins are mostly not where you can walk among them: they are under the modern streets, buried by later building, or under the sea after subsidence and earthquakes rearranged the coastline. The city is not empty of its past. Its past is simply out of easy reach, which is a different and more interesting problem than nothing having survived at all.

The catacombs and the Graeco-Roman core

If you see one thing in Alexandria, see the catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa, and give them more than a passing look. This is a second-century AD burial complex cut down through rock, reached by a spiral staircase that winds around an open central shaft. What makes it more than a set of tombs is the carving. Egyptian, Greek and Roman styles sit side by side on the same walls, the clearest single example in the city of the mixing of cultures that Alexandria was built on — the jackal-headed Anubis turned out in a Roman soldier's uniform is the image people remember. The lowest level is usually flooded, so you will not see all of it, but the main chambers are the point.

Around it sits the rest of the Graeco-Roman core, and it repays a guide. Kom el-Dikka, a short distance away, has a small, well-preserved Roman theatre and the remains of a bath house, dug out of the middle of the modern city. Pompey's Pillar, inland, is a single tall column raised for the emperor Diocletian around AD 298 and misnamed after Pompey much later; it takes twenty minutes and no more. The Graeco-Roman Museum, reopened in 2023 after a long closure, gathers the best of what has come out of the city and its harbour, and it is the piece most rushed visits skip entirely.

The reason to put a guide with these three, rather than the library or the Corniche, is that the on-site labelling is thin and the interest is historical rather than visual. A column, a small theatre and a set of tombs do not explain themselves. Someone who knows the Greek and Roman period turns them into the story of a city that was Greek, then Roman, and kept its own gods in the mix throughout. Without that, they can read as a set of stones. With it, they are the most rewarding half-day in Alexandria.

How do you get there from Cairo?

Alexandria is roughly 220 km from Cairo. The fast trains take about two and a half hours and are the civilised option. By road it is about three hours each way, longer if Cairo traffic is having a bad morning. Day trips are sold and they work, but you leave before dawn, see three sites at speed and get back after dark. It is a long day for what it is.

One night is the sensible minimum, two if you want an evening on the Corniche and a slow morning downtown. We usually place Alexandria at the start or end of a trip, either side of the international flights into Cairo, rather than squeezing it between Nile days.

How Alexandria fits into an Egypt trip

The placement matters as much as the number of nights, and it is where itineraries most often go wrong. Alexandria is the leg most Egypt trips never reach, and for good reason: a first week has to earn its keep on the pharaonic core — Giza, Luxor, Aswan — and the coast is the wrong priority against those. It is at ten days and up, or on a return trip where the Nile is already done, that a night or two here starts to make sense without cutting something better.

When it does go in, the sensible slot is the start or the end of the trip, either side of the international flights that land in Cairo anyway. Dropped into the middle, it costs you two travel days and breaks the run south, which is the last thing a Nile itinerary needs. Put at the end, it works as a deliberate change of gear: after a week of temples in the heat, a couple of cooler days by the sea with a different history behind them is a mercy rather than a chore.

Getting there is not the obstacle people expect. The fast train from Cairo does the run in about two and a half hours and is not at the mercy of Cairo traffic the way a car is, which makes an overnight genuinely easy to arrange. The obstacle is only ever the days: Alexandria asks for two of them to be worth doing, and on a short first trip those two days are almost always better spent further south.

Where to eat, and what the food is like

Alexandria is where you eat fish, and it does it better than anywhere else in the country. The form is simple and worth knowing before you sit down: you choose your fish by weight from a bed of ice at the front of the restaurant, and it comes back grilled or fried with salads and bread. The seafront around Anfoushi, near the western harbour, is the obvious place for it, with the day's catch laid out to pick from. This is one of the real pleasures of the city and a genuine reason to stay for dinner rather than catch the afternoon train back.

Away from the fish, the other thing to seek out is the old cafe culture downtown. Alexandria's cosmopolitan century left behind Greek and Italian cafes with the fittings still in place, and an unhurried coffee in one of them is part of what the city is for. It is a slower, more European register than Cairo, and it rewards travellers who treat the place as somewhere to sit for an evening rather than a checklist of monuments to clear before dark.

When is the best time to go?

This city runs on a different calendar from the rest of Egypt. Summer here is around 30C rather than the 40C of Luxor, so July and August are the busy months and the seafront fills with Egyptian holidaymakers. Winter is mild but genuinely wet by Egyptian standards: Alexandria gets more rain than almost anywhere else in the country, roughly 200 mm a year, and a grey, blustery week in January is normal. Spring and autumn are the reliable choice — warm, dry enough, and the sites are quiet.

The winter rain is the specific trap, because it undoes the reasons to come. Half of Alexandria's appeal is outdoors — the Corniche at dusk, the walk downtown, the position at Qaitbay — and a wet, windy January day strips those out and leaves you with three indoor stops. The heat is never the problem here that it is in Upper Egypt; the weather risk is the opposite one, a grey coast rather than a fierce sun. If your Egypt dates fall in the depths of winter, this is the one part of the country where the season genuinely argues against going.

In practice the coast inverts the pattern of the Nile valley. Luxor and Aswan want a winter or shoulder date to be bearable; Alexandria wants spring or autumn to be at its best, and it is at its liveliest, if also its most crowded with locals, in the high summer that punishes everywhere south of it. If you are building an itinerary across seasons, that is a useful thing to know: the coast and the valley are comfortable at slightly different times, and the shoulder months are the ones that suit both.

What is the city like to walk around?

This is a working city of several million people, not a resort, and it behaves like one. The downtown grid is walkable and the Corniche is a long, flat walk, but crossing the Corniche road takes nerve. Traffic is heavy, pavements are uneven, and taxis are cheap and easy. Hassle is lighter than in Luxor or at the pyramids, because far fewer visitors come.

Dress is more conservative than you might expect on a Mediterranean seafront. Local women swim clothed, and a swimsuit on a city beach will draw attention. Away from the water, ordinary travel clothes are fine. English is widely understood downtown and less so in the western districts.

How to spend one or two days here

With a single full day, and a guide for the historical sites, the honest order is the catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa first, then Kom el-Dikka and the Graeco-Roman Museum close by, and Pompey's Pillar as a quick add-on. That is the Graeco-Roman half-day, and it is the part that most needs someone to explain it. The library and the Corniche fill the rest, and Qaitbay Citadel at the western harbour is the natural end, with the light behind you and the fishing boats below.

A second day is where the city stops being a list of sites and starts being a place. Use it for a slow downtown morning among the faded facades and the old cafes, an unhurried lunch of fish chosen off the ice near Anfoushi, and time simply spent on the Corniche without a departure hanging over you. This is the part a day trip deletes entirely, and it is the part most people who like Alexandria are actually remembering when they recommend it.

The one hard constraint on any plan is the catacombs and the stairs. There is a spiral staircase around an open shaft and no lift, so anyone unsteady on their feet should build the day around what they can manage and accept that this single best site may be out of reach. Everything else — the library, the Corniche, the position at Qaitbay — is far gentler, which is worth knowing when you are deciding who in the party does what.