Last updated: September 2026
Alexandria holidays offer the most cosmopolitan and historically layered city experience in Egypt — a Mediterranean port founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC that was for centuries the greatest city in the ancient world, home to the legendary Library of Alexandria and the Pharos lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders. Today it is Egypt’s second-largest city and main port, with a beautiful corniche stretching along the Mediterranean seafront and a cultural heritage that blends Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Jewish and Arabic traditions in a unique Mediterranean mosaic.
For UK travellers, Alexandria provides a fascinating alternative to Cairo’s ancient monuments — a city that rewards exploration rather than tick-list sightseeing, with atmosphere, history and the pleasure of the sea in equal measure. This guide covers what you need to plan a rewarding Alexandria holiday.
Alexandria attracts a different visitor from Cairo — one who is drawn by atmosphere and history rather than the blockbuster ancient monuments of the Nile valley. The city has a distinctly Mediterranean character: the seafront, the elegant decaying apartments of the 19th-century European quarter, the cafés where philosophers and poets once argued, and the general sense of a city conscious of its own extraordinary past.
The city is Egypt’s most European-feeling destination, shaped by the waves of Greek, Jewish, Italian and French settlers who lived here through the 19th and early 20th centuries. Lawrence Durrell immortalised this lost cosmopolitan Alexandria in his Alexandria Quartet novels, and while that world has mostly gone, its ghost is still tangible in the city’s architecture, its café culture and its relationship with the sea.
Alexandria is primarily visited as a day trip from Cairo (2.5 hours by train) but merits at least 2–3 nights for visitors who want to explore the city properly. It can also be the starting point for a journey west along the Mediterranean coast towards Marsa Matruh and the extraordinary El Alamein battlefield and museum.
Alexandria’s Corniche — the seafront boulevard stretching for over 20 kilometres along the curve of the Eastern Harbour and beyond — is the defining feature of the city and one of the great urban seafronts in the Mediterranean. The drive or walk along the Corniche, with the Mediterranean on one side and the mixed architecture of colonial-era buildings and modern apartment blocks on the other, gives a strong sense of Alexandria’s layered character.
The Eastern Harbour is particularly atmospheric: fishing boats bob alongside pleasure craft in the protected bay, the Qaitbay Citadel commands the northern headland, and the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina — its angled disc-shaped roof catching the sunlight — rises at the water’s edge. The Stanley Bridge, arching across the bay further east, is one of Alexandria’s more modern landmarks and a popular viewpoint for watching the sunset over the Mediterranean.
The city’s beaches are generally better than those of Cairo but should not be considered the main reason to visit — they are urban beaches rather than resort beaches and can be crowded in summer. Montazah Palace Gardens on the eastern edge of the city offers a more pleasant waterfront environment: landscaped gardens extending to the sea around the royal summer palaces of the Khedive Abbas II, with calm swimming areas in the sheltered bays below the gardens.
The Qaitbay Citadel at the tip of the Eastern Harbour peninsula was built in 1477 on the exact site of the ancient Pharos lighthouse, using stones from the fallen lighthouse (itself destroyed by earthquakes in the 14th century) as building material. The fortress — a compact but well-preserved medieval structure — provides excellent views across the harbour and bay, and the National Maritime Museum within its walls displays anchors, amphorae and maritime artefacts recovered from Alexandria’s underwater archaeological sites.
The Catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa are the most impressive ancient monument in Alexandria: a rock-cut underground necropolis carved in the 1st century AD that combines Egyptian, Greek and Roman artistic traditions in a single extraordinary space. Three levels of carved chambers descend below street level, with the lowest — the main tomb chamber — featuring a remarkable blend of Egyptian hieroglyphics and iconography with Greco-Roman architectural forms. The catacombs were discovered in 1900 when a donkey fell through the entrance shaft.
The Greco-Roman Museum, currently undergoing extensive renovation, houses an important collection of artefacts from Alexandria’s ancient period including mummy portraits of haunting realism painted in encaustic wax. The Roman amphitheatre at Kom el-Dikka — the only well-preserved Roman theatre in Egypt, with 13 rows of white marble seating — is a small but evocative site in the middle of a modern residential neighbourhood. Nearby excavations have revealed Roman villa mosaics and a lecture hall complex associated with the ancient universities of Alexandria.
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is the most striking modern building in Egypt: a vast tilted disc of granite and glass that rises from the Mediterranean waterfront as a deliberately symbolic replacement for the ancient Library of Alexandria, which was one of the greatest repositories of knowledge in the ancient world. Designed by a Norwegian architectural firm and opened in 2002, the building houses a main library of 8 million books, several specialist museums and a planetarium.
The exterior wall of the library is covered in carvings of letters and characters from every writing system in the world — an appropriate monument for an institution dedicated to the preservation of human knowledge. The interior reading rooms, designed to be naturally lit through the tilted glass ceiling, are genuinely impressive architectural spaces. The museums within the complex include the Manuscripts Museum (housing some of the oldest manuscripts in the world), the Antiquities Museum and a History of Science Museum.
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is open to visitors without a library card and the entrance fee covers access to all the museum collections. It is one of the most visited cultural institutions in Egypt and essential for any visitor to Alexandria interested in the city’s intellectual heritage. The building’s café terrace, looking directly across the Eastern Harbour to the Qaitbay Citadel, is an excellent place for lunch between visits.
Alexandria is considered by many Egyptians to have the finest seafood in the country, a reputation that rests on the city’s long fishing tradition and the quality of Mediterranean catch available daily at the fish markets along the Corniche. The Souq el-Samak (fish market) near the Eastern Harbour is the main daily market: you choose your fish by eye from the display, agree a price, and it is cooked to your specification — grilled, fried or in a spiced tomato sauce — at the adjoining restaurant. This is genuine Alexandria street-food culture at its finest.
The traditional Alexandrian cafés — among the most famous is the Trianon near the Cecil Hotel — preserve something of the city’s 20th-century cosmopolitan atmosphere: marble tables, wood panelling, strong coffee and an atmosphere of unhurried conversation. The Cecil Hotel itself, now a Sofitel, was frequented by Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and various World War Two military figures during the desert campaigns, and its bar retains a period elegance.
The Alexandrian dish of hawawshi — minced spiced meat baked inside a flatbread — is a local street food staple. Ful medames and ta‘amiya (Egyptian falafel) are the standard breakfast at local cafeterias. The city’s excellent pastry shops and confectioners produce European-influenced sweets — a legacy of the Greek and Italian communities — alongside traditional Egyptian desserts.
Alexandria Borg el Arab Airport (HBE) receives some international flights but is less well-connected from the UK than Cairo. The most practical approach for UK visitors is to fly to Cairo International Airport and travel to Alexandria by train from Cairo Ramses Station — the journey takes approximately 2 hours on the fast intercity services and is comfortable, frequent and inexpensive. The Alexandria railway station deposits you in the heart of the city centre, within walking distance of the Corniche.
Cairo to Alexandria by private car takes around 2 hours 30 minutes via the Desert Road. This is a practical option for visitors travelling on an organised tour that includes both cities. Alexandria is comfortably visited as a day trip from Cairo but warrants an overnight stay for those who want to experience the city’s evening atmosphere and explore more comprehensively.
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Alexandria is worth visiting for a very different reason than Cairo. Cairo overwhelms with ancient monuments and energy; Alexandria rewards with atmosphere, cosmopolitan history and the pleasures of a Mediterranean seafront city. They complement each other well, and the 2-hour train journey makes combining both in a single Egypt trip straightforward.
Visitors with a strong interest in the Greco-Roman period of Egyptian history, the history of the ancient Library, or the 19th-century cosmopolitan era of Egypt will find Alexandria particularly rewarding. Those focused purely on pharaonic history may prefer to allocate their limited time to Cairo, Luxor and Aswan instead.
Alexandria has public beaches, with the most popular concentrated in the eastern part of the city — Sidi Bishr, Miami Beach and the Stanley area. These are genuine city beaches rather than resort beaches, busy with Egyptians (particularly on Fridays and Saturdays) and varying in cleanliness. Montazah Palace Gardens at the eastern end of the Corniche has calmer and cleaner swimming areas within the landscaped gardens.
For resort-standard beaches, the coastal towns west of Alexandria — particularly Marsa Matruh on the Mediterranean, 300 kilometres away — offer spectacular clear blue water and white sand beaches that rival anything in North Africa. These require an overnight stay or full day trip from Alexandria.
The ancient Library of Alexandria was one of the most significant institutions of the ancient world, accumulating at its peak perhaps 700,000 scrolls across all subjects of human knowledge. Its destruction was a long, gradual process rather than a single event: the library suffered damage during Julius Caesar’s siege of Alexandria in 48 BC, during the reign of Aurelian in the 270s AD, and was progressively depleted over centuries of political upheaval before the final dispersal of its collections in late antiquity.
The romantic idea of a single catastrophic burning of the library was largely a later invention. The reality — a slow decline of an institution over several centuries as the political and intellectual culture that sustained it changed — is perhaps more tragic than the dramatic narrative. The modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina is an explicit attempt to restore the city’s identity as a centre of learning and culture.
The train is the best option for most visitors. Egyptian National Railways operates frequent services between Cairo Ramses Station and Alexandria’s Misr Station, with the fast intercity trains (marked “Turbini” or “Spanish”) covering the 220 kilometres in around 2 hours. First-class air-conditioned carriages are comfortable and tickets are purchased easily at the station or online. Services run throughout the day in both directions.
Private cars and taxis make the journey via the Desert Road in around 2 hours 30 minutes and are useful for groups or visitors travelling on an organised tour. The coastal road via El Alamein is longer but scenic and allows a stop at the El Alamein War Cemetery and Museum, which commemorates the decisive 1942 battle of the North Africa campaign.
Yes — if you book a flight-inclusive Alexandria package through a UK ATOL-licensed tour operator. Your money and return flights are protected if the operator fails. Booking flights and hotel separately removes ATOL protection. See our holiday protection guide for the full breakdown on ATOL, ABTA and Section 75.
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