Alexandria turns its back on the desert and faces the sea, and that single fact makes it feel like a different country. Founded by Alexander the Great and once home to the ancient world's greatest library and the Pharos lighthouse, it spent two millennia as the Mediterranean's most cosmopolitan port — Greek, Roman, Jewish, Italian and Levantine all at once. What remains is a city of faded glamour: art-deco façades streaked with sea salt, Belle Époque cafés, and a long curving Corniche made for an evening walk as the waves come over the wall.

The history here is layered and often underground. The Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa spiral three levels down into rock where Egyptian and Greco-Roman funerary art fuse; the Roman Amphitheatre at Kom el-Dikka is the only one in Egypt; and the Citadel of Qaitbay, a 15th-century sea fort, stands on the very rubble of the lost Pharos at the harbour mouth. The modern echo of the ancient library, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, is a dazzling tilted glass disc on the waterfront — a 21st-century temple of knowledge raised where the original once burned.

But Alexandrians will tell you the real reason to come is to eat fish and drink coffee. The seafood is the best in Egypt: at places like the glass-walled Fish Market above the harbour or century-old Greek institutions out at Abu Qir, you choose your catch by the kilo and watch it grilled. Between meals, the literary cafés — frescoed Trianon, grand Délices on Saad Zaghloul Square — keep the old, slow, sea-breeze rhythm of the city alive.