Egypt is a strange and wonderful place to spend Christmas, and not for the reason most brochures give you.
This Cairo Christmas tour runs four days and three nights, entirely in and around the capital. You get the Giza plateau and the Grand Egyptian Museum, Saqqara and the Step Pyramid, Memphis, Sneferu’s two pyramids at Dahshur, Salah al-Din’s Citadel, the alleys of Khan el-Khalili, and the churches and synagogue of Coptic Cairo. A working Egyptologist guides every day of it, privately — your own guide, your own driver, your own vehicle, nobody else’s schedule.
What makes the festive version different is Coptic Cairo, and it is worth understanding why. Egypt has one of the oldest continuous Christian communities on earth. The Holy Family are held to have sheltered in the crypt beneath Abu Serga, and Egyptian Christians have worshipped in that quarter since long before most of Europe was converted. Visiting it in the last week of December, with the Coptic Nativity fast still running and the churches preparing for their own Christmas on 7 January, is a different experience from visiting it in March.
An honest word about the decorations. Cairo is not Vienna. You will find Christmas trees in hotel lobbies, lights along the malls, and real festivity in Zamalek, Maadi and Heliopolis where the Christian and expatriate communities are concentrated — but the city as a whole does not transform the way a European capital does. What Cairo gives you instead is a mid-December afternoon at the pyramids in shirtsleeves, and a Christmas Eve gala dinner at your hotel that is included in the price, never charged as a supplement.
Choose Gold accommodation (Egyptian 5-star standard, roughly a 3.5-star in the US or Europe) or Platinum (Egyptian 5-star deluxe, roughly a 4-star). Twin, single and triple rooms are all available.
Your Egypt Best Vacations representative meets you inside the arrivals terminal at Cairo International Airport, holding a signboard, and stays with you through passport control and visa formalities. A private transfer takes you to your hotel, where the rest of the day is yours.
If you land on 24 December, tonight is the gala dinner. If not, it falls on whichever day of your itinerary Christmas Eve lands — your guide will confirm it with you on day one.
Meals Plan: No Meals Included
An early start for the Giza plateau, which is the right call in any season and especially in December, when the light is low and the afternoon crowds build. The pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure went up within about eighty years of each other in the Fourth Dynasty, and Khufu’s is the last of the seven wonders of the ancient world still standing. Your Egyptologist will show you where the original casing survives near Khafre’s apex, why the three differ in size, and what the boat pits and subsidiary pyramids were for. Then down to the Sphinx, carved from a single outcrop of bedrock left behind when Khufu’s builders quarried the plateau.
Lunch, then the Grand Egyptian Museum, which sits about two kilometres from the plateau with the pyramids framed in its glazed north wall. The complete Tutankhamun collection is here — over five thousand objects shown together in one place for the first time since Howard Carter cleared the tomb — along with the colossus of Ramesses II standing in the atrium, the Grand Staircase lined with royal statuary, and Khufu’s cedar solar boat, moved here from its old pavilion beside the Great Pyramid.
Seeing the pyramids in the morning and their contents in the afternoon is the right order, and it is the reason we pair them on one day rather than splitting them.
Optional: Going inside the Great Pyramid
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
Today is the one most four-day Cairo itineraries leave out, and the one Egyptologists would keep.
Start at Saqqara, the necropolis of Memphis, and the Step Pyramid of Djoser. Built for the Third Dynasty king by his architect Imhotep, it is the oldest known pyramid in Egypt and the earliest large-scale cut-stone building anywhere in the world — the moment Egyptian architecture stopped using mud brick and started using stone.
Then Memphis itself, at Mit Rahina, capital of unified Egypt for most of the Old Kingdom. Little stands above ground now, but the open-air museum holds a fallen colossus of Ramesses II, close to eleven metres of him, and an alabaster sphinx that gives you a sense of what the city once was.
Finally Dahshur, and the two pyramids of Sneferu, Khufu’s father. The Bent Pyramid changes angle partway up, from about fifty-four degrees to forty-three, which is what a construction crisis looks like when it is preserved in limestone. The Red Pyramid beside it is the correction — the first successful true pyramid anyone built, and the direct ancestor of everything at Giza. Dahshur is quiet in a way Giza never is, and you will often have it more or less to yourselves.
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
Check out after breakfast — your luggage travels with you today — and begin in Coptic Cairo, inside the walls of the Roman fortress of Babylon. This is the morning that makes the itinerary a Christmas one rather than a Cairo one. The Hanging Church was founded in the third century and rebuilt from the seventh, and it is suspended over the fortress gatehouse — hence the name, and hence the wooden floor panel that lets you look down through it.
Abu Serga stands above the crypt where tradition places the Holy Family’s refuge during the flight into Egypt, which is why this quarter matters at Christmas in a way it does not at other times of year. The Ben Ezra Synagogue, a few steps away, is where the Cairo Geniza was found in the 1890s — nearly three hundred thousand medieval manuscripts that rewrote what we know about Mediterranean trade and daily life.
On to the Citadel, begun by Salah al-Din in 1176 to hold Cairo against the Crusaders and used as the seat of Egyptian government for the following seven hundred years. Inside its walls stands the Mosque of Muhammad Ali, known as the Alabaster Mosque for the facing on its lower walls — Ottoman in plan, nineteenth century in date, and visible from most of the city.
Lunch, then Khan el-Khalili, a working bazaar since the fourteenth century. December is its busiest month and the copper, spice and gold sellers are worth the crush. Your transfer to Cairo Airport follows.
If your dates run to 6 January, your guide can arrange for you to attend Coptic Christmas Eve mass. Say so at booking, because it needs planning.
Optional: Coptic Christmas Eve mass on 6 January, arranged on request
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
| Triple room, per person | $670 |
| Twin room, per person | $730 |
| Single room, per person | $1.240 |
Hotels:
| Triple room, per person | $770 |
| Twin room, per person | $880 |
| Triple room, per person | $1,495 |
Hotels:
Both tiers include the Christmas Eve gala dinner, the same private Egyptologist and the same itinerary.
