The City of the Dead, Cairo

Much of what this entry describes is currently being bulldozed.

The City of the Dead, also called the Cairo Necropolis or the Qarafa, is a series of vast Islamic-era cemeteries running roughly four miles north and south of the Cairo Citadel, below the Mokattam Hills and outside the historic city walls. It falls inside the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Historic Cairo. It divides into the Northern Cemetery, also called the Eastern Cemetery because it lies east of the old walls, and the older Southern Cemetery, with a smaller burying ground north of Bab al-Nasr.

It has been built up over centuries, and it holds both the graves of ordinary Cairenes and the elaborate mausoleums of the city's rulers and elites. It began with the early city of Fustat, founded in 642 CE, and reached its height of prestige and monumentality under the Mamluks in the 13th to 15th centuries.

The part people find strangest is the oldest thing about it. The necropolis has always had living inhabitants: gravediggers and tomb custodians whose work was here, Sufis and religious scholars studying in the complexes that sultans and wealthy patrons endowed, and ordinary residents of the small settlements and villages in the area. That population rose and fell with the times. From the late 19th century, and much more through the 20th, Cairo's urbanisation and housing shortage pushed far more people to live among the tombs.

Writing for the Atlantic Council in September 2023, the journalist Shahira Amin reported that a large part of the necropolis has been reduced to rubble as bulldozers continue to raze it, taking with it mausoleums dating to the Mamluk era and the resting places of scholars, cultural figures, rulers and members of Egypt's royal and elite families.

Check what still stands before you plan a route.