Alexandria: 11 sights, from the Bibliotheca to Qaitbay

Opened in 2002 near the presumed site of the ancient library founded under the Ptolemies, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is a glass and granite disc tilted towards the sea, designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta. Its granite wall is carved with characters from many of the world's scripts.

The great reading room steps down in terraces beneath a roof of skylights. The complex also houses an antiquities museum, a manuscripts museum and a planetarium, open with a fuller ticket.

The Mamluk sultan Qaitbay built this fort in the late 15th century at the tip of the former island of Pharos, where the Lighthouse of Alexandria once stood, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, brought down by earthquakes in the Middle Ages. Blocks from the lighthouse are thought to have been reused in its walls.

You walk through the square keep, the inner mosque and the wave-beaten ramparts, with a view along the whole curve of the Eastern Harbour and the Corniche.

Cut into the limestone in the 2nd century AD and rediscovered in 1900, this underground necropolis descends three levels by a spiral staircase. The main tomb blends styles: Egyptian gods such as Anubis dressed as Roman legionaries, serpents and Medusa heads, columns with papyrus capitals.

You also see the funerary banquet hall and galleries of niches cut for hundreds of burials. The lowest level is sometimes flooded and closed.

Alexandria's Graeco-Roman Museum reopened in October 2023 after nearly eighteen years of works. Its galleries trace the city of the Ptolemies and the Roman period: statues, portraits, sarcophagi, mosaics and everyday objects.

It is the natural companion to the city's ancient sites, a few minutes from the Roman theatre of Kom el-Dikka.

About 27 metres high, this single column of red Aswan granite stands on the hill where the Serapeum, the great temple of Serapis, once rose. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with Pompey: it was raised at the end of the 3rd century in honour of the emperor Diocletian.

Around it you see two granite sphinxes, the temple foundations and the underground galleries of the Serapeum, which may have housed an annex of the library.

The Alexandria National Museum occupies a restored palace on Tariq el-Horreya street, a short walk from the centre. Open to the public since 2003, it traces the region's history over three floors.

The visit follows a chronological route: Pharaonic Egypt, then Greco-Roman Alexandria (statues, coins, ceramics), and finally the Coptic, Islamic and modern periods. The collections are well presented, with explanatory panels.

Uncovered from the 1960s in the middle of the city, the Kom el-Dikka site holds the only Roman theatre known in Egypt: a small semicircular building with marble tiers and about 800 seats. Baths, late-antique lecture halls and houses have been excavated around it.

The Villa of the Birds, on the same site, keeps its floor mosaics in place under a shelter.

At the eastern end of the city, the Montazah estate was the summer residence of the Muhammad Ali dynasty, then of kings Fuad and Farouk. Its gardens of palms and pines run down to the sea around the neo-Florentine palace.

The palace is not open to visitors, but the park, its coves and its seafront promenade are. It is one of the city's few large green spaces.

In the Anfushi district, between the centre and Qaitbay, Alexandria's largest mosque holds the tomb of Abu al-Abbas al-Mursi, a 13th-century Sufi saint born in Murcia, in Andalusia. The present building, rebuilt in the 20th century, follows a neo-Mamluk style with a tall minaret and domes.

The octagonal prayer hall is decorated with granite columns and arabesques; the square in front fills with people during religious festivals.

The beaches along the central Corniche are narrow and packed in summer; the pleasant ones are in the east, in the coves of Montazah and on the long beach of Mamoura, just past the royal estate. They are run by concessions that rent out umbrellas and loungers.

The season peaks in July and August, when Egyptian families from Cairo come to escape the heat. Outside summer the beaches are quiet, and you can still swim until October.

Around the Attarine Mosque, in the old centre, this district of narrow streets is known for its antique dealers: furniture from the cosmopolitan era, chandeliers, copperware and objects from Alexandria's grand houses. Hardware and spice stalls sit beside workshops.

It is an everyday trading district, not a tourist market: come to wander and hunt for finds.