Manial Palace

The Manial Palace is the most beautiful palace museum in Cairo — a 19th-century royal residence on Rhoda Island in the Nile built by Prince Muhammad Ali Tewfik (uncle of King Farouk) in an eclectic mix of Ottoman, Moorish, Persian, and Rococo styles that is simultaneously overwhelming and exquisite. The prince, who never became king but lived like one, designed the palace himself and filled it with the kind of decorative excess that makes European palace collections look restrained.

The palace complex includes a reception palace (with rooms decorated in different Islamic styles — Moorish, Ottoman, Mamluk, Persian — each more elaborate than the last), a private mosque (with a minaret decorated in blue tilework), a hunting museum (displaying the prince's taxidermied trophies), a throne room, and gardens planted with rare tropical species that the prince collected from his travels. The combination of architectural styles — which would be incoherent in less skilled hands — creates an interior that is both fantastical and deeply knowledgeable about the Islamic architectural traditions it draws from.

The palace is on Rhoda Island, accessible by bridge from both Old Cairo and the Giza bank, and its Nile-side gardens provide a peaceful riverside retreat from the city. The Nilometer, a structure dating to 861 AD used to measure the Nile's flood levels (which determined Egypt's agricultural prosperity and tax rates for over a millennium), is at the island's southern tip and can be combined with a Manial Palace visit.