Budget · 3-hour walk · Cairo
Downtown and Zamalek in three hours
The Egyptian Museum on Tahrir, the bridge with the lions and the tower on the island.
The six-hour route walks Islamic Cairo. This is the 19th-century city Khedive Ismail built to look like Paris, plus the island in the Nile the embassies moved to. The Egyptian Museum has been half-emptied into the new one at Giza and is all the better for it — quieter, still enormous, and the mummies and Tutankhamun's smaller objects remain.
The route, stop by stop
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Egyptian Museum
Opened 1902 and still arranged in the old way, which is now part of the appeal. Much has moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum; what is left has room to breathe.
85 min here Walk here → -
Tahrir Square
The centre of the 2011 uprising, now with a relocated obelisk and four ram-headed sphinxes in the middle of a roundabout.
10 min here Walk here → -
Qasr El Nil Bridge
The 1931 bridge to the island, with four bronze lions at its ends. Cairenes walk out onto it in the evening for the breeze.
20 min here Walk here → -
Cairo Tower
A 187-metre concrete lattice modelled on a lotus, built in the 1950s. The whole city, the river, and on a clear day the pyramids.
40 min here Walk here →
More in Cairo
Every walking route in Cairo, or the full Cairo guide for where to stay and what a day costs.