Cairo: the museum, the metro and the traffic

Cairo is not a city anyone sees in a day, and it does not reward a rushed first morning. It is the largest city in Africa and in the Arab world, the capital of a country of more than a hundred million people, and a place where three thousand years of carved stone sit inside a working metropolis of flyovers, metro tunnels, minarets and thirty million airport passengers a year. Two things decide how the first day goes: the way in from the airport, and whether your phone works.

About 9.8 million people live in the Cairo Governorate, and Greater Cairo, which reaches across the river into Giza and north into Qalyubia, holds more than twenty-two million of them. The city stands where the Nile splits into the delta, which is the whole reason it exists. For a visitor that means a city of districts rather than one centre: Downtown and Islamic Cairo on the east bank, Zamalek on its island, Giza and the pyramids on the west.

Fustat, al-Qahira, and a name that stuck

This crossing point has been worth holding for a very long time. Memphis, capital of the Old Kingdom, stood a little to the south, and the Romans built the fortress of Babylon on the east bank at the turn of the fourth century. The Arab conquest arrived in 641, and Amr ibn al-As founded Fustat beside that fortress, with a mosque that still stands. Then, in 969, the Fatimids built a walled palace city to the north east and called it al-Qahira, the Vanquisher: the name that stayed. Saladin took Egypt in 1171 and began the Citadel five years later, and the city has been the seat of government in one form or another ever since.

Under the Mamluks, from 1250 to 1517, Cairo grew into one of the great cities of the medieval world: close to half a million people by 1340, which made it the largest city west of China, and a stop on the spice road. The Ottomans took it in 1517. Then, in the 1860s, Isma’il Pasha rebuilt the western edge of the city on a Parisian plan of squares and boulevards, which is why Downtown looks the way it does, and Tahrir Square in the middle of that district became the centre of the world’s news in 2011. Egyptians call the city Masr, which is also their word for Egypt itself.

When to go

Cairo has a hot desert climate, a phrase that hides the shape of the year. Winter is mild and sometimes cold: the average daily maximum in January is 18.9 degrees, and the nights fall to about ten. Summer is long and reliably hot, at 32.2 degrees in May, 34.6 in June and 35.0 in July, with no real relief until October. Rain is negligible at any time of year, about 25 millimetres in twelve months, nearly all of it between November and March.

In practice the sightseeing year splits in two. From October to April the days are comfortable and the sites are busy. From May to September the mornings and the evenings carry the day, with the middle hours spent in a museum or a shaded courtyard. One other thing is worth knowing: the khamsin, a hot dusty wind, blows in from the desert between March and May and can close the view for a day.

Arriving from the airport

Cairo International sits in Heliopolis, 15 to 20 kilometres north east of the centre, and it is the busiest airport in Egypt, with 30.94 million passengers in 2025. Terminal 3, opened in 2009 and the largest of the four, is the EgyptAir hub and where most long-haul arrivals land, and a hotel is linked to it by a 230 metre skyway, which matters if you land at two in the morning.

There is no metro station at the airport: Line 3 was meant to reach it, and that plan was dropped in 2020 in favour of a shuttle bus from Adly Mansour station, the eastern terminus of Line 3. So the realistic choices are a taxi or limousine from the kerb, at fixed prices by car category, a ride-hailing car, which is the simplest answer once you have data, or the shuttle plus the metro, which is the cheap way in if you are travelling light and it is not the middle of the night. Allow an hour to the centre and more at the peaks, because the airport sits on the far side of a city of twenty-two million people.

Getting around, and the traffic that shapes the day

The metro is the one part of Cairo that behaves. It opened on 27 September 1987 as the first metro in Africa and the Middle East, and it now runs three lines over 106.8 kilometres and 89 stations, carrying around five million rides a day. Trains start at five in the morning and run until one, and until two during Ramadan.

Fares changed on 27 March 2026 and are banded by distance: ten pounds for up to nine stops, twelve up to sixteen, fifteen up to twenty-three, and twenty beyond that. The fourth and fifth cars of every train have been reserved for women since 1989, and the platforms mark where they stop. Line 1 crosses the city north to south between New El Marg and Helwan. Line 2 runs from Shubra El Kheima to El Mounib and made the first tunnel under the Nile. Line 3 links Rod El-Farag and Cairo University with Adly Mansour, where it meets the light rail and the airport shuttle, and Line 4 is under construction, due to open in 2028 with a station for the Grand Egyptian Museum.

Everything else moves slowly. The main corridors run at 15 to 40 kilometres an hour for most of the day, with peaks between eight and nine in the morning and six and seven in the evening, and the World Bank has put the wasted time and fuel at about four per cent of the country’s GDP. White taxis have meters and are supposed to use them; in practice the ride-hailing apps, Uber, Careem, Bolt and DiDi, are easier for a visitor because the price is fixed before the car arrives. Walking works well inside a district, and is a pleasure in Islamic Cairo and Zamalek. It does not work between districts.

Staying online

Data earns its place within the first hour: the ride-hailing app, the metro map, the museum ticket bought on a phone. An arrivals hall is not the place to sort that out with your bags beside you, and a local SIM involves a passport, a queue and a registration.

There are three answers, and the choice is the same as anywhere. Your own operator’s roaming pass, if it is cheap and the trip is short. A local SIM, if you are staying long enough to want a local number. Or a travel eSIM, installed at home and switched on when you land, which for a first trip to a country where you will move between cities is the least trouble of the three.

What to see, and where to sleep

The Grand Egyptian Museum opened in full on 1 November 2025, two kilometres from the pyramids, and it has changed how a first visit should be planned. It is the largest museum in the world devoted to a single civilisation: more than 100,000 objects, twelve galleries arranged in chronological order, the 11 metre statue of Ramesses II standing in the atrium, and two halls given over to all 5,398 pieces from the tomb of Tutankhamun, shown together for the first time. His mummy stays in the Valley of the Kings. Allow a full day, and buy the ticket before you go.

The older Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square, opened in 1902, still holds around 170,000 items, among them the Narmer Palette and the treasures of Tanis, and it is calmer now that Tutankhamun has moved. In Fustat, the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization holds the royal mummies carried across the city in the Golden Parade of 2021.

Islamic Cairo is the other half of the trip: al-Muizz Street, the mosque of al-Azhar, the mosque of Ibn Tulun from 876, the Citadel begun by Saladin with the Muhammad Ali mosque above it, and the Khan el-Khalili bazaar, trading on the same ground since 1385. Coptic Cairo, inside the walls of the fortress of Babylon, holds the Hanging Church and the Ben Ezra synagogue where the Geniza documents were found.

For a base, Downtown keeps you near the museum and the metro, Zamalek is quieter on its island, and Giza puts you beside the pyramids and the new museum.

Days out

Ramses Station is the hub of the national rail network, so Alexandria is reachable by train in a morning, and the second city is a country apart: a Mediterranean corniche and a great library. Saqqara and Dahshur, south of Cairo, hold the step pyramid and the first true pyramids, and Memphis, the Old Kingdom capital, is on the same road.

One caution from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office: travel insurance should cover what you plan to do, and adventure activities such as quad biking are often excluded. Read the policy before you book, not after.

Cairo is loud, it is dusty, and it takes a day to learn the rules of the traffic. Then it turns into one of the most generous cities in the world to visit: a museum the size of a small town, a medieval city still working as a market, and the Nile running through the middle of it at the end of the day.