Cairo
UNESCO World Heritage Site: Historic Cairo (1979). A Thousand Years Of Mosques, Madrasas And Bazaars In One Walkable Quarter, From Ibn Tulun And Sultan Hassan To Khan El Khalili And The Citadel Of Saladin, Inside The Largest City In Africa And The Arab World · Cairo, Cairo
Cairo is the largest city in Africa and the Arab world, and the part worth a traveller's time is a medieval one: a dense quarter of mosques, madrasas, gates and bazaars built between the ninth century and the nineteenth, inscribed by UNESCO as Historic Cairo and still entirely in use. You can walk from Ibn Tulun, the oldest intact mosque in Egypt, through the Citadel of Saladin with its Ottoman silhouette, down al-Muizz street past the Mamluk facades to Khan el-Khalili, where the bazaar has been trading on the same ground for six hundred years. South of it Coptic Cairo holds the Hanging Church and a synagogue older than both. The city is loud, dusty, enormous and relentless with sellers, and it is also the most rewarding urban walking in the region if you treat the hassle as weather rather than insult. Go up Al-Azhar Park at dusk for the view, eat koshari standing up, and cross the road the way Cairenes do, which is slowly and without stopping.
From Islamic Cairo and Khan el-Khalili through the Citadel to Coptic Cairo and the Nile corniche, Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
Mosques open to visitors outside prayer times, which means avoiding the middle of Friday altogether and allowing for five daily prayers at the working ones; the big monument mosques keep daytime hours and charge admission, while the small living ones are free and ask only for modesty and bare feet. Khan el-Khalili trades all day and into the evening and is liveliest after dark, with many shops closed on Sunday. The Citadel keeps daytime hours. Coptic Cairo's churches open mornings and close early. Museum hours shift and the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir is in transition now that the Grand Egyptian Museum has opened, so confirm what is on show there before building a day around it. Ramadan changes everything: shorter days, dead afternoons and streets that come alive after sunset. The metro is cheap, fast and has women-only carriages.