Alexandria, Egypt: the Mediterranean coast, the library and the corniche

Evergreen city guide with quick facts, travel, business, and culture.

EgyptAlexandria

Overview

Alexandria is Egypt's Mediterranean city and its second largest — a long sea-facing corniche, a modern library on an ancient idea, and a seafood culture found nowhere else in the country.

The Library

A tilted granite disc carved with the world's alphabets, over a reading room stepped across eleven levels.

Citadel & Ancient Sites

Qaitbay on the Pharos foundations, three-level Roman catacombs, a marble theatre and Pompey's Pillar.

Mediterranean Seafood

Pick your fish from the ice and choose the cooking — the one Egyptian city where the sea sets the menu.

Corniche & Sea Air

Kilometres of seafront, old trams behind it, palace gardens and small bays at the eastern end.

Culture

Alexandria is Egypt's seafood city and eats unlike anywhere else in the country. The convention is to choose your fish from the ice at the entrance and specify the cooking — grilled over coals, fried, or baked in a salt crust — after which it arrives with small salads, tahina and bread. Sea bass, bream, red mullet, prawns and calamari are the staples. The street food is distinctive too: fried liver sandwiches in spiced bread and dedicated sausage-sandwich stands, both eaten standing up. The old centre keeps several long-established patisseries and coffee houses whose high-ceilinged rooms have barely changed in decades, and they remain the best place in the city to sit for an hour. Festivals: Alexandria Mediterranean Film Festival, in autumn, Ramadan evenings along the corniche, dates moving yearly, Sham el-Nessim spring picnics, on the Monday after Coptic Easter, Summer concert seasons at the library and the opera house. Museums: Bibliotheca Alexandrina and its antiquities and manuscript museums, Cavafy Museum, Graeco-Roman Museum, Royal Jewellery Museum.

Practical Info

Safety: Alexandria is generally comfortable and ordinary city awareness covers most of it: keep valuables secure in crowded markets and on busy trams, and expect persistent but good-natured attention around the main sights. Traffic is the genuine hazard — crossing the corniche demands patience and a decisive step rather than hesitation, and pedestrian priority is theoretical. The sea looks inviting but currents along the open coast are strong and lifeguard cover is inconsistent outside the managed bays. Dress is somewhat more conservative than in Red Sea resorts, and modest clothing is appreciated away from beaches, particularly around mosques. Language: Arabic, in a distinctly Alexandrian accent. English is widely used in hotels, the library and tourist-facing businesses. French is genuinely present as well — taught in a number of schools and supported by a cultural institute — which makes the city an easier landing for francophone visitors than most of Egypt. Currency: The Egyptian pound. Cards are accepted in hotels, the larger restaurants and the library complex, but cash is the norm for taxis, trams, markets, street food and small cafés, and small notes are worth accumulating. ATMs are common in the central districts and along the corniche; carry cash before heading to Anfushi or the older quarters.
Travel Overview

Alexandria faces the wrong way for a country defined by the Nile: it looks north, out to sea, and that single fact shapes everything a visitor notices. The city runs for kilometres along a curving corniche above the Eastern Harbour, the weather is Mediterranean rather than Saharan — genuinely rainy in winter, mercifully cooler than Cairo in summer — and the food is built on fish rather than the Delta's meat and beans. Founded in the fourth century BCE and named after its founder, Alexandria was the ancient world's great intellectual capital, and the two things it was most famous for are precisely the two you cannot see: the Pharos lighthouse and the original library are both gone. What stands in their places is the point. On the lighthouse's foundations sits the fifteenth-century citadel of Qaitbay, built partly from the fallen stones. Beside the harbour stands the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, opened in 2002 — a vast tilted disc of granite carved with characters from the world's writing systems, holding a reading room stepped over eleven levels, and functioning as a working answer to the loss rather than a monument to it. Between them the city is layered and unglamorous: Roman catacombs cut on three levels, a small Roman theatre, mosques and churches within streets of each other, and an old tram network still grinding along the eastern seafront. Two days is enough. Come for the sea, the library, the seafood and the rare pleasure of an Egyptian city that is not built around a temple.

Discover Alexandria

The modern library is the reason many people come, and it earns it. The main building is an enormous disc tilted towards the sea, its outer granite wall carved with characters drawn from writing systems around the world, and inside is a single reading room stepped down over eleven cascading levels — one of the great interior spaces built anywhere this century. It is a working research library rather than a replica of the ancient one, and the complex around it carries changing exhibitions, a planetarium and several small museums, including one of antiquities and one dedicated to manuscripts. Allow half a day if the exhibitions interest you, and note that the reading room and the museums are separately accessed.

Frequently asked questions

Yes, if you want a change of register rather than more pharaonic monuments. Alexandria's appeal is that it is a Mediterranean city: sea air, a long corniche, cooler weather, a seafood culture that exists nowhere else in Egypt, and a modern library that is one of the finest interiors built this century. What it is not is a temple destination — the two things it was most famous for in antiquity, the lighthouse and the original library, are both gone. Go for the atmosphere, the food and the sea, and treat the Roman sites as a bonus rather than the reason.

Two days covers it comfortably: one for the library, the citadel and a long walk on the corniche, and a second for the catacombs, the Roman theatre, Pompey's Pillar and the Cavafy apartment, with a proper seafood lunch built into each. A single day trip from Cairo is possible and many people do it, but the train journey at both ends leaves the afternoon rushed and you will miss the evening, which is when the city is at its best. Staying one night changes the trip substantially.

Spring and autumn, without much competition. Alexandria has a genuinely Mediterranean climate rather than a desert one, so winter is mild but grey and properly rainy — the corniche loses much of its appeal in a downpour — while summer is hot and packed with Egyptian holidaymakers, which pushes accommodation prices up and fills every beach. April, May, September and October give you warm sea air, workable temperatures for walking the sites, and a city that belongs to its residents rather than to the domestic holiday season.