Start from 43 curated places around Cairo, EG, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Koshary Abou Tarek
The benchmark for koshary, Egypt's beloved national dish of rice, lentils, pasta, and chickpeas under fried onions and a tangy tomato sauce, served fast across several busy floors downtown. Cheap, filling, vegetarian by default, and an essential Cairo rite.
Felfela
A quirky, plant-draped downtown institution serving Egyptian classics since the 1960s, beloved for its falafel (taameya), fuul, and mezze in a warren of a dining room. A nostalgic, tourist-and-local crossover that has kept its soul.
Trails & outdoors
Al-Azhar Park
A beautifully landscaped hilltop park built on a former rubble mound between Islamic Cairo and the City of the Dead, with formal gardens, water channels, and a sweeping view over the medieval skyline of domes and minarets. The city's finest green space and an easy escape.
Wadi Degla Protectorate
A protected desert limestone canyon on the southeastern edge of the city near Maadi, with flat-bottomed trails between fossil-studded cliffs that feel a world away from the megacity. The closest place to Cairo for a genuine desert hike or bike.
Things to do
Grand Egyptian Museum
The vast new museum on the edge of the Giza plateau, the largest archaeological museum in the world, displaying Tutankhamun's complete treasures together for the first time alongside a monumental statue-lined grand staircase. A genuinely world-class, half-to-full-day experience.
The Egyptian Museum
The grand old red museum on Tahrir Square, a gloriously crammed century-old institution still packed with sarcophagi, statues, and antiquities even after its royal mummies moved to the new civilization museum and Tutankhamun's treasures to the Grand Egyptian Museum. The atmospheric, old-school counterpart to the gleaming new museums.
Landmarks & sights
Pyramids of Giza
The last surviving wonder of the ancient world, three colossal 4,500-year-old pyramids rising straight off the desert plateau at the city's western edge. No photograph prepares you for the scale; standing beneath the Great Pyramid is the reason most people come to Egypt.
Great Sphinx of Giza
The enigmatic lion-bodied, human-headed colossus carved from a single limestone outcrop, guarding the Giza plateau below the pyramids. Smaller than its legend in some ways, larger in presence, and endlessly mysterious in origin.