Tahrir Square

Tahrir Square is Cairo's great civic heart — a vast roundabout of traffic, grand facades and history, where the city's twentieth-century story played out in full public view. The salmon-pink Egyptian Museum stands on its north side, the monolithic Mogamma on the south, and boulevards radiate off toward downtown's Belle Époque streets.

It isn't a manicured tourist plaza; it's a working, roaring intersection best experienced as a gateway. Cross into the Egyptian Museum, then wander the downtown grid of cafés, bookshops and crumbling grandeur that fans out from here. Standing in the din, you feel the pulse of a city of twenty million.