Alexandria Day Trip from Cairo: Mediterranean City on the Nile Delta

Alexandria is Egypt's second city and most different — a Mediterranean port on the Nile Delta coast, 220 kilometres north of Cairo, that was once the most important city in the ancient world and retains a distinct character shaped by its Greek, Jewish, and European heritage that sets it apart from the Pharaonic Egypt of the Nile Valley. A day trip from Cairo by train (2-2.5 hours on the fast Turbini service from Ramses Station) provides a compelling contrast to the capital — a seafront city of Art Deco apartment buildings, fish restaurants, and the magnificent new Bibliotheca Alexandrina that seeks to recreate the spirit of the ancient library that made the city synonymous with knowledge in the ancient world.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, opened in 2002, is the largest library in the Arab world and a genuine architectural monument — designed by the Norwegian firm Snohetta as a circular disc tilting toward the sea, its granite exterior covered with letters from 120 alphabets of the world, while the interior's vast reading room descends in cascading terraces toward a skylight ceiling that admits natural light. The library complex includes museums of antiquities, manuscripts, science, and art that together constitute the most significant cultural complex built in Egypt since the ancient temples of the Pharaohs. The site faces the eastern harbour where the ancient library once stood before its destruction — the precise date and cause of which remains disputed by historians.

The Alexandria corniche — the long waterfront boulevard running along the Mediterranean — is the city's social heart, lined with cafes, fish restaurants, and the distinctive green-painted trams that have been running along the coast since 1863. The Montaza Palace gardens at the eastern end of the corniche provide a formal garden and beach escape popular with Alexandrian families on weekends. The city's fish restaurants around the Anfushi waterfront serve the Mediterranean catch of the day — sea bass, red mullet, squid, and shrimp grilled fresh and accompanied by tahini, salads, and Egyptian flatbread — in the most authentic form of coastal Egyptian cuisine available anywhere. Alexandria's melancholy beauty, the sense of a great Mediterranean city declining gently from its extraordinary past, gives the day trip from Cairo a distinctly atmospheric quality.