Most Egypt Christmas itineraries treat the season as decoration. This one goes to the place where Christianity in Africa actually began.
Alexandria is where the Egyptian church was founded. Tradition holds that St Mark the Evangelist brought Christianity there in the middle of the first century AD and was martyred in the city, and the Coptic Orthodox Pope still carries the title Pope of Alexandria today. Egypt’s Christians have been worshipping continuously since long before most of Europe converted. Standing in Alexandria in late December, with the Coptic Nativity fast running and churches preparing for their own Christmas on 7 January, is a different experience from standing there in June.
The rest of this Cairo and Alexandria Christmas tour is the classic short introduction to Egypt, done privately. The Giza plateau and the Grand Egyptian Museum on day two. Alexandria’s Roman catacombs, Pompey’s Pillar and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina on day three. Coptic Cairo, Salah al-Din’s Citadel and Khan el-Khalili on the last morning. Four days, three nights, your own Egyptologist for all of it.
A word of honesty about the festivity itself. Egypt does not transform for 25 December the way a European capital does. You will find trees and lights in hotel lobbies and shopping centres, and real celebration in the Christian quarters of both cities, but the country as a whole carries on. What you get instead is the Giza plateau at around 19°C in low winter light, a Mediterranean corniche in Alexandria that is at its best out of season, and a Christmas Eve gala dinner at your hotel that is included in the price rather than 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, and 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, cut from a single outcrop of bedrock left behind when Khufu’s builders quarried the plateau.
Lunch, then the Grand Egyptian Museum, two kilometres away with the pyramids framed in its glazed north wall. The complete Tutankhamun collection is here — over five thousand objects displayed together for the first time since Howard Carter cleared the tomb — along with the colossus of Ramesses II in the atrium, the Grand Staircase of royal statuary, and Khufu’s cedar solar boat.
Pyramids in the morning, what came out of them in the afternoon. Back to your hotel in the late afternoon.
Optional: Going inside the Great Pyramid
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
A long day, and worth saying so plainly: Alexandria is about two and a half to three hours from Cairo each way along the desert road, so this is an early departure and a late return. Your private vehicle makes it considerably easier than the coach alternative.
Alexander founded the city in 331 BC and it became the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean world. Start underground at the Catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa, cut three levels into the rock in the second century AD and lost until a donkey fell through the roof in 1900. What makes them extraordinary is the collision of styles in a single chamber: Egyptian gods carved in Roman dress, Greek architectural detail, a banqueting hall where families ate beside their dead.
Then Pompey’s Pillar, which has nothing whatever to do with Pompey — that was a medieval misidentification by Crusaders. The column is a single shaft of Aswan granite close to twenty-seven metres tall, raised around 298 AD in honour of the emperor Diocletian, and it stands in the ruins of the Serapeum, the temple of Serapis that once held a daughter library of the great one.
Then, to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, opened in 2002 beside the site of its ancient predecessor. The reading room descends in eleven terraces under a tilted disc of a roof, and the complex holds manuscript and antiquities museums alongside the working library. Finally ascend the Qaitbay Fort, built on top of the destroyed Alexandria Lighthouse to defend Egypt against the Turks.
Lunch by the Mediterranean before the drive back to Cairo.
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. 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 glass 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. 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 historians knew 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 and busiest in December. 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.
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
All prices are in US dollars, per person, per trip. This tour runs on festive departures only, 21 December to 10 January, so there is a single price band rather than a seasonal ladder.
Hotels: Safir Cairo, Sonesta Hotel, Ramses Hilton, Cairo Pyramid, HolidayInn Citystars and more
| Triple room, per person | $800 |
| Twin room, per person | $900 |
| Single room, per person | $1,530 |
Hotels: Concorde El-Salam, Hilton Nile Tower, Hilton Heliopolis, Tolip Family Park and more.
| Triple room, per person | $890 |
| Twin room, per person | $1,050 |
| Single room, per person | $1,785 |
Both tiers include the Christmas Eve gala dinner, the same private Egyptologist and the same itinerary. Only the hotel changes.
