Photo : Yasseralghol — CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Cairo · Gezira, Zamalek
Cairo Tower
One hundred and eighty-seven metres midstream, and the city readable at a glance. Go up at dusk.
Built between 1956 and 1961 to designs by the Egyptian engineer Naoum Shebib, the tower is a latticed concrete shaft that opens at the top into a lotus crown. It stands one hundred and eighty-seven metres high, a good forty more than the Great Pyramid, and it was the tallest structure in Africa for about a decade. The top platform is open to the sky; below it, a revolving restaurant and a cafeteria. The city reads better from here than from a map: Gezira island, the bridges, downtown, the Citadel, and on a clear day the line of the pyramids to the west.
The extra bit
Go up forty minutes before sunset: you get the city by day, the light going, then the lights coming on, without queueing twice. The cafeteria on the lower level is enough for sitting down; at the revolving restaurant you are mostly paying for a floor that moves.
Know before you go
A single lift serves the top and the queue can be long at the end of the day; time up there is cut short when it is busy. Haze and pollution decide everything: the pyramids show only on clear days, more often in winter or the day after a windy one. It blows up there, and the platform is ringed with mesh — shoot through the gaps, not through the wire.
