Four days in Cairo: the pyramids are the short half of the trip

Three nights downtown, one full day on the Giza plateau and in the new museum beside it, one walking Islamic Cairo, and a last morning on Tahrir.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Cairo
Places
9 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

There are really two Cairos, laid on top of each other, and most visitors only see one of them. There is the Giza plateau, which is twelve kilometres from the middle of town and is what everyone comes for. Then there is the city itself: a thousand years of mosques, merchant houses and mausoleums packed into a few square kilometres east of the Nile, with a working bazaar running through the middle of it.

Four days is enough for both, comfortably, if you split them. One day belongs to the plateau and the museum built beside it. One belongs to Islamic Cairo on foot. The arrival evening and the departure morning take the two things that sit closest to the centre, so neither is wasted getting somewhere.

The city is loud, hot and relentlessly sociable, and it wears people down faster than they expect. Days here start early, because the sun does, and finish in the late afternoon with a long sit and a glass of tea. That is how Cairenes do it too.

Highlights

  • The Great Pyramid at opening time, before the coaches arrive
  • Tutankhamun's burial goods in the Grand Egyptian Museum, two kilometres from the tomb builders' own pyramids
  • The climbable minaret at Ibn Tulun, the oldest in Egypt, with the whole city underneath it
  • The bazaar at Khan el-Khalili late in the evening, once the coach parties have gone
  • A felucca on the Nile at sunset, sailed rather than motored

Where to stay

Cairo, three nights

The city began as Fustat in 641, a garrison town founded by the Arab general who took Egypt, and became Cairo proper in 969 when the Fatimids laid out a walled palace-city just to the north and called it al-Qahira, the victorious. Egyptians still call the whole place Masr, which is also their word for the country.

Everything here sits within that history or well before it. The Giza pyramids predate the city by about two and a half thousand years and were already ancient monuments when Fustat was pitched. The mosques of Islamic Cairo run from the ninth century to the nineteenth in a line you can walk in an afternoon.

Three nights is the shortest stay that does not force a choice between the pyramids and the city. Add a fourth night if you want Saqqara and Dahshur, which are the better pyramids for anyone who has already seen Giza in photographs their whole life.

Day by day

Day 1 in Cairo

The Nile at sunset and the bazaar after dark

Land, drop the bags, and do nothing strenuous. Cairo International is about fifteen kilometres northeast of the centre and the road in takes anywhere from thirty minutes to well over an hour, so treat the arrival hour as unknown and keep the evening loose.

The best first sight of the city is from the water. Feluccas moor along the Corniche in Garden City and go out for an hour under sail, which drops the traffic noise to nothing and turns the towers on both banks gold. Agree the price before you step aboard, and take the boat late enough that you are still out when the sun goes.

Then east, to Midan Hussein, where the mosque holding the shrine of the Prophet's grandson faces a square full of cafes and the Khan el-Khalili bazaar spreads out behind it. The bazaar is a daytime coach stop and a night-time city; the difference is enormous. Sit outside with mint tea and a shisha, and let the first evening be that.

  1. 15:00

    Arrive and check in

    Note

    Uber and Careem both serve the airport terminals and cost a fraction of the fixed-price taxi desks inside.

  2. 17:00

    Fellucca tour

    Visit

    Feluccas wait along the Corniche near the Four Seasons and need no booking. An hour is plenty, and evening is far better than the middle of a hot day.

  3. 18:30

    Dinner off Midan Hussein

    Eat

    Grilled meat, koshari and stuffed pigeon are the local order. The cafes on the square charge for the view and are worth it once.

  4. 20:00

    Midan Hussein and Sayyidna al-Hussein Mosque

    Religious

    The present mosque dates from 1870 and stands on a much older one. Non-Muslims cannot go in, but the square in front of it is the way into Khan el-Khalili and busiest around ten at night.

With more time: If you land early enough to want an afternoon, the Museum of Islamic Art near Bab al-Khalq is a short ride from downtown and rarely busy, and it makes a good primer for the mosques you will see on day three.

Day 2 in Cairo

The Great Pyramid, the Sphinx and the Grand Egyptian Museum

Be at the Giza gate when it opens. This is the one piece of timing on the whole trip that decides how the day feels: the plateau in the first hour is quiet, cool and almost empty, and by half past ten it is coaches, camels and heat with nowhere to hide from any of them.

The Great Pyramid was raised for Khufu in the Fourth Dynasty, around 2500 BC, from more than two million blocks moved by hand. It stood 146 metres and has lost about nine of them off the top, which still leaves it taller than anything else you will see today. Walk out west and south from it and the plateau opens up: Khafre's pyramid on higher ground with a cap of its original limestone casing still in place, Menkaure's smaller one beyond, and the queens' pyramids and nobles' tombs scattered between them where nobody goes.

The Sphinx sits down at the eastern edge, below the causeway, carved out of the bedrock and generally attributed to Khafre's reign. It is smaller than most people imagine and better than most people expect, mostly because of where it looks.

In the afternoon, the Grand Egyptian Museum, a short hop from the plateau and built to hold what the old museum could not. Four hours is a comfortable pass and you will not have four; do the Tutankhamun galleries properly and pick one other era, then leave. The burial goods of a minor pharaoh, complete, two kilometres from the pyramids of the dynasties that came before him, is as close as this trip gets to a single unbeatable hour.

  1. 08:00

    Great Pyramid of Giza

    Historic

    Go straight to it at opening. The interior ticket is bought separately at the gate; the climb up the Grand Gallery is hot and cramped and ends in a bare granite room.

  2. 10:45

    Great Sphinx of Giza

    Historic

    Ten minutes downhill from Khufu, at the far end of the causeway. The viewing terrace fills up, so go before the coach parties finish with Khufu.

  3. 12:00

    Lunch near the plateau

    Eat

    The cheap local places by the main entrance do falafel and Egyptian pasta for very little. The hotel terraces nearby charge several times as much for the same food and a view of the pyramids.

  4. 14:00

    Grand Egyptian Museum

    Historic

    Enormous, and new enough that the crowds have not settled into a pattern. The Tutankhamun gallery is the reason to come. Allow at least three hours, more if you like museums.

With more time: Two ways to extend the day. The sound and light show at the pyramids runs in the evening and is proudly kitsch, with the Sphinx narrating a version of history that Egyptologists wince at. Or swap the museum for a taxi south to Dahshur, where the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid stand in the desert with almost nobody at them and you can climb down inside one.

Day 3 in Cairo

Ibn Tulun, Sultan Hassan and the Citadel

A day on foot through the medieval city, walking uphill towards the Citadel and finishing at the view. Start at Ibn Tulun, raised in the 870s by an Abbasid governor and unlike anything else in Egypt: a vast, plain, arcaded courtyard on a six acre site, built to hold every man in the city at Friday prayer, with a spiral minaret that owes its shape to Samarra in Iraq. It is the oldest minaret in the country and you can climb it. Do.

Ten minutes east and the mood changes completely. Sultan Hassan, finished in 1363, is Mamluk architecture at full volume: a cliff of stone wrapped around a cross-shaped courtyard, with four vaulted halls for the four schools of Sunni law and a mausoleum behind the prayer wall. Al-Rifa'i faces it across the square, five and a half centuries younger and built to match, and holds among its tombs that of the last Shah of Iran.

Above both of them is the Citadel, which Saladin began fortifying in the twelfth century and which ruled Egypt for the next seven hundred years. The Ottoman-style mosque inside it, with the two pencil minarets you have been seeing on the skyline all day, was built by Muhammad Ali between 1830 and 1848 and holds his tomb. Go out to the terrace on the western side: on a clear afternoon the pyramids are on the horizon, past the whole city.

  1. 09:00

    Ibn Tulun Mosque

    Religious

    Leave your shoes at the door, and take socks. The minaret staircase is external and exposed, and the roof view over the courtyard is the best thing in Islamic Cairo.

  2. 10:45

    Sultan Hassan Mosque

    Religious

    One ticket usually covers both this and Al-Rifa'i across the square. Stand in the middle of the courtyard and look up: the scale is the point.

  3. 12:00

    Lunch below the Citadel

    Eat

    Simple grill houses and koshari counters line the streets between Sultan Hassan and the Citadel ramp. Eat before you go up; the food inside the walls is tourist food.

  4. 14:15

    Mohammed Ali Mosque

    Religious

    The mosque is the landmark, but the Citadel ticket also covers a cluster of small museums and the terrace with the view. Late afternoon light is the best of the day.

With more time: The Gayer-Anderson Museum shares a wall with Ibn Tulun and takes half an hour: two joined Ottoman houses kept as a British Egyptologist furnished them. For the evening, Al-Azhar Park is landscaped along the old city wall with the Citadel lit up across the valley, or walk the northern Fatimid axis past the Qalawun complex and Al-Azhar Mosque, founded in 970 and still a working university.

Day 4 in Cairo

The Egyptian Museum on Tahrir

Leave the last morning for the pink building on the north side of Midan Tahrir. The collection was assembled from 1858 onwards to stop the country's antiquities walking out of it, and moved into this building in 1900, where it has been overflowing ever since.

It is a different museum now that Tutankhamun has gone to Giza and the royal mummies have gone to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Fustat. Quieter, less queued, and easier to enjoy: rooms of Old Kingdom statuary, a hall of Amarna heads, cases of things labelled in faded typescript from before anybody thought about visitor flow. Two hours is enough, and Sadat metro station is under the square outside when you are done.

If your flight is late, walk out of the museum and along the Corniche, or sit in one of the shaded cafe alleys behind Champollion Street with a coffee and watch downtown do its thing. Cairo is at its best when you stop trying to get anywhere in it.

  1. 09:00

    Egyptian Museum

    Culture

    Cheaper and calmer than it used to be, and still holds far more than it can display well. Go early, keep to the ground floor Old Kingdom rooms if time is short.

  2. 12:00

    Last lunch downtown

    Eat

    The old restaurants and pastry houses around Talaat Harb and Zamalek are the sit-down option; the queue outside a shawarma counter is usually the better one.

With more time: With a later flight, take the metro two stops to Mar Girgis and walk Old Cairo: the Hanging Church suspended over a Roman gatehouse, the Ben Ezra Synagogue where the medieval Geniza archive was found in 1890, and the Coptic Museum between them. It is compact, shaded and about an hour and a half.

Before you go

Where to stay

Downtown, between Midan Tahrir and Midan Talaat Harb, puts you on the metro, a short walk from the Egyptian Museum and the Corniche, and inside a grid of nineteenth century apartment blocks that is worth walking for its own sake. It is the noisiest option and the best connected.

Zamalek, on the northern half of Gezira island, is the quieter choice: leafy, walkable, full of embassies and old cafes, and one bridge from downtown. Garden City, just south of Tahrir, sits somewhere between the two.

Hotels out at Giza put the pyramids at the end of the street and everything else forty minutes away in traffic. That trade is worth it for one or two nights if the view from the roof terrace is the point of your trip, and not otherwise.

Getting around

The metro is the only transport in Cairo that ignores traffic, and traffic here is the whole problem. Three lines, tickets sold by distance for a couple of Egyptian pounds, and the interchanges you need are Sadat at Tahrir, Shohadaa at Midan Ramses and Attaba. The front carriages are reserved for women. Buy tickets with small change and expect no queue to form.

For everything the metro does not reach, use Uber or Careem. Both work well, both are cheap by European standards, and both remove the entire negotiation that a street taxi involves. A driver who tells you your destination is closed today and offers an alternative is running the oldest scam in the city.

Crossing the road is a skill. Traffic does not stop for you, but it does flow around you if you walk steadily and predictably. Cross with a local the first few times and copy what they do.

Tickets, touts and baksheesh

At Giza the site ticket gets you onto the plateau; going inside the Great Pyramid costs extra and is bought separately at the entrance. The interior is a hot, steep, low crawl up a wooden ramp to an empty granite chamber, which some people find unforgettable and others regret. Anyone claustrophobic should skip it without guilt.

Camel and horse men at Giza are persistent and the price you agree at the start is rarely the price asked at the end. If you want a ride, settle the amount, the duration and the drop-off point before you get on, and pay nothing until you are back on the ground.

Small tips oil everything here: the man who opens a tomb, the attendant who points out a fresco, the person who watches your shoes at a mosque door. Carry a pocket of small notes separately from your wallet, so you are never opening a full wallet in front of somebody.

When to come, and what to wear

November to March is the season, with daytime highs mostly under the mid twenties and cold enough at night for a jacket. Summer at Giza means shade that does not exist and heat that turns a morning on the plateau into an endurance test, so if you come between June and September, do everything outdoors before eleven.

Mosques are working buildings and several on this trip are among the most important in the country. Shoulders and knees covered for everyone, a scarf over the hair for women, shoes off at the door. Dress the same way in the bazaar and around Old Cairo; you will be more comfortable and hassled less.

Cairo does not reward hurry. The city is too big, too hot and too congested to be beaten by a tight schedule, and the visitors who enjoy it are the ones who plan one serious thing a day and let the rest happen.

Four days done this way leaves the two biggest sights on separate mornings, both of them started early, and the afternoons for whatever the city puts in front of you. That usually turns out to be a glass of tea and somebody who wants to know where you are from.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

Copy to my trips

Common questions

Is four days enough for Cairo?
For Giza, the Grand Egyptian Museum, Islamic Cairo and the Egyptian Museum, yes, with an evening spare. What four days will not fit is Saqqara and Dahshur, which need most of a day of their own, or Alexandria, which is a long day trip by train and better as an overnight.
Which museum should I visit if I only have time for one?
The Grand Egyptian Museum, for the Tutankhamun galleries and because it is next to the pyramids anyway. The Egyptian Museum on Tahrir is the one to choose if you prefer old-fashioned, overstuffed collections to new lighting, and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization is the one to choose if you want the royal mummies.
Do I need a guide at the pyramids?
Not to find your way around; the plateau is self-explanatory and signposted. A guide is worth it for the archaeology and, more practically, because a guide deflects the camel men and the unofficial helpers who will otherwise attach themselves to you all morning. Book one through your hotel rather than at the gate.
Is Cairo safe to walk around?
Generally yes, including after dark on busy streets, and the main risk to a visitor is being scammed rather than robbed. The rule of thumb locals give is that anyone who approaches you unprompted in the street wants something. Women travelling alone should expect a lot of catcalling in crowded areas.
How do I get from Cairo to Luxor or Aswan?
The overnight sleeper train from Ramses Station, which takes about ten hours to Luxor and thirteen to Aswan and is run by a different company from the day trains, or a one hour flight. If you copy this itinerary into the planner, add the onward leg as a train and it will draw from Ramses.