Cairo from the Citadel to Ibn Tulun
Saladin's fortress, an Ottoman viceroy's answer to Istanbul, a royal tomb holding a shah, and the oldest mosque in Cairo still standing as it was built.
This is a self-guided walk, not a guided tour with a leader: no booking, no fixed start time. See the walking route and the walking map before you go, then follow the numbers — the audio guide plays by itself as you reach each stop. Free, with no app to install and no sign-up.
At ~85 min it fits a half day of independent travel, and joining it to another walk in Cairo makes a full-day itinerary.
More walking tours in Cairo
- Heart of Cairo: Khan el-Khalili & Historic Al-Muizz Street Walk — 5 stops, ~30 min
All Egypt walking tours · All 149 routes
Cairo, Egypt · ~85 min · 2.2 km · 5 stops
Stops on this walk
1. Cairo Citadel (Saladin Citadel)
The fortress that ruled Egypt for seven hundred years.
Salah al-Din began the Citadel in 1176 on a spur of the Muqattam hills, placing it between the two existing cities of Cairo and Fustat so that it commanded both. It was the seat of Egyptian government from the thirteenth century until the 1870s. What you walk through is layered: Ayyubid walls, Mamluk additions, and the Ottoman-era rebuilding by Muhammad Ali, who cleared much of the medieval palace complex to make room for his own.
A fort built to watch two cities ended up deciding which one survived. Fustat faded; Cairo grew up around the hill.
2. Muhammad Ali Mosque
An Ottoman mosque in Cairo, built to look like Istanbul on purpose.
Muhammad Ali Pasha had this built between 1830 and 1848. The design follows Ottoman imperial mosques in Istanbul rather than Cairene tradition: a central dome on half-domes, and two pencil minarets of a kind Cairo had never had. The clock in the courtyard was a gift from Louis-Philippe of France, sent in exchange for the obelisk that now stands in the Place de la Concorde. It has reportedly never worked properly.
A ruler who wanted to be read as an equal of the Sultan built in the Sultan's style, on the highest ground in the city. The building is a claim about rank.
3. Al-Rifa'i Mosque
A mosque begun in 1869 and finished in 1912 — and the tomb of the last Shah of Iran.
Khushyar Hanim, mother of the Khedive Ismail, commissioned it in 1869 to hold the tombs of her family. Work stopped for two decades after the original architect died and did not finish until 1912. It was built deliberately beside the fourteenth-century Sultan Hassan mosque, in a style meant to match it. It holds the tombs of King Farouk and of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, who died in exile in Cairo in 1980.
A nineteenth-century building made to look fourteenth-century, holding a twentieth-century exile. The mosque is a place where three times are kept in one room.
4. Mosque of Ibn Tulun
Built 876–879 and never rebuilt — the oldest mosque in Cairo in its original form.
Ahmad ibn Tulun, sent from Baghdad as governor and then ruling Egypt in his own right, built this between 876 and 879. It is enormous and almost empty: a vast courtyard ringed by arcades of pointed arches carried on brick piers, not on columns robbed from older buildings as was usual. The minaret has an external spiral staircase, which is unique in Egypt and is usually explained as a borrowing from Samarra, where Ibn Tulun grew up.
Everything else on this walk was rebuilt, refaced or repurposed. This one was not. What you are standing in is what ninth-century Cairo actually looked like.
5. Gayer-Anderson Museum
Two old houses joined together, furnished by a British officer who lived here until 1942.
The two houses date from 1540 and 1632 and were joined by a bridge at upper-floor level. In 1935 the Egyptian government allowed Major Robert Gayer-Anderson, a British army doctor and collector, to live in them on condition that he restore them and leave the contents to Egypt. He left in 1942 and the house opened as a museum. Because it was lived in rather than assembled, it is one of the few places where the inside of an Ottoman-era Cairene house can be seen furnished.
The condition of his tenancy was that he give it back. It is a rare case in this period where a collector's house ended up belonging to the country it was collected in.