Photo : R Prazeres — CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Cairo · Darb el-Ahmar
Bab Zuweila
The southern gate of Fatimid Cairo, topped by two Mamluk minarets you can climb.
Bab Zuweila is one of three surviving gates of the Fatimid wall, raised around 1092 under the vizier Badr al-Jamali; it was the city's southern exit, as Bab al-Futuh and Bab al-Nasr were its northern ones. Its doubled outline came three centuries later, when the Mamluks set the minarets of Sultan al-Mu'ayyad Shaykh's mosque on the two towers. Executions were staged at this gate, and it was here that the Ottomans hanged Tuman Bay, the last Mamluk sultan, in 1517. Cairenes call it Bab el-Mitwalli, and they used to nail wishes to its timber, a practice whose traces are still on the door.
The extra bit
Inside the gate, the minaret stair comes out above the roofs, and from up there you can follow al-Muizz Street from end to end, with the Citadel away to the south. There is nowhere else to climb along this stretch of al-Muizz.
Know before you go
Narrow, steep, dark in places and without a continuous handrail, the stair is not for everyone, and a wheelchair cannot go up it at all. Whether the gate and the minarets are open depends on a keeper, and that is not guaranteed. Just to the south is the covered Tentmakers' street, worth the detour.
