For a first visit
Egypt, measured rather than marketed.
Where the great sites actually are, how high above the sea they sit, and what each month is really like at each one — from NASA’s climate records and a radar survey of the land. No adjectives, no “best time to visit”: the measurements, and your own judgement about the heat.
Almost nobody visits most of Egypt.
Egypt is about a million square kilometres and a visitor sees a thread of it. Scroll, and the map follows.
One country, two habitable strips
Egypt covers roughly a million square kilometres, and almost all of it is desert nobody lives in. The inhabited country is the Nile and its delta — a green thread and a fan — plus two coasts. Every site below sits on one of them.
The Delta and the capital
The Nile splits north of Cairo and fans into the Mediterranean. This is the densest, wettest, mildest part of the country: Cairo, Alexandria, the pyramid fields at Giza and Saqqara on the desert edge just west of the river. If you have three days, they are here.
Upper Egypt, which is in the south
Confusingly, Upper Egypt is the southern half — upper as in upstream. The Nile runs north, so everything is named from the water’s point of view. Luxor sits here, with Karnak on the east bank and the Valley of the Kings on the west. It is markedly hotter than Cairo, and the table below says by how much.
The far south
Aswan and, 280 km further on, Abu Simbel — close enough to Sudan that the temples were cut apart and lifted 65 metres in the 1960s to escape the rising lake behind the High Dam. The hottest readings on this page are here.
The Western Desert
West of the river is the Sahara, punctuated by oases. Siwa is close to the Libyan border and was isolated enough to keep its own Berber language. The White Desert is chalk eroded into shapes. Both are a long drive from anywhere, which is the point of them.
Sinai and the Red Sea
The peninsula between Africa and Asia: mountains, Saint Catherine’s monastery at the foot of one of them, and reef coast at Dahab. Saint Catherine sits high enough to be genuinely cold in winter — the only place on this page where that is true.
What is it like in…?
Egypt’s sites are spread across nine degrees of latitude and the difference is not small. Pick a month and the map and table below both move to it.
| Site | Day | Night | Rain mm/day |
|---|
What these numbers are not. They are long-run monthly averages modelled by NASA’s POWER climatology from the MERRA-2 reanalysis — not weather-station readings, and emphatically not a forecast. They answer “what is August usually like at Abu Simbel”. They cannot tell you anything about the day you actually travel, and a single hot week will not appear in them at all.
Three figures, three different questions. The day and night columns are the climatological mean daily maximum and minimum, averaged across 2001–2020 from POWER’s monthly series — what a normal afternoon and night actually reach. Each site’s own panel also shows the all-day mean and the record extremes, the hottest and coldest hours ever measured in that month. An earlier version of this page published those extremes under the words “mean daily maximum”, which put Giza’s August at 45 °C when a normal afternoon is nearer 35. The climatology endpoint cannot give a mean daily maximum at all; the monthly one can, so the page now uses both.
How high each place sits.
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Why this is here and not a 3D flythrough. A cinematic aerial tour of Egypt would have to be either footage somebody shot, which we do not have, or imagery generated by a model, which would be invented terrain sitting next to measured figures on the same page. So this is the honest version of the same information: the actual ground elevation at each site’s own coordinates, from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission’s 30-metre survey. Every bar is a radar measurement of real land.
Walk the land in cross-section.
An elevation for a single point tells you almost nothing. What explains Egypt is the shape of the ground — how narrow the green strip really is, that the pyramids stand on a scarp their builders chose rather than raised, how far the desert falls below the sea. Each line below is sampled from NASA’s radar elevation model at up to two hundred points. Every metre is a measurement of the land, and none of it is an artist’s impression.
Every temperature above was tested against a weather station.
The figures on this page come from a model, not a thermometer. So before the build is allowed to publish them, it compares each one against the official normals the Egyptian Meteorological Authority publishes through the World Meteorological Organization — a completely separate source, which cannot be fooled by a mistake made while reading the first one. If the comparison fails, nothing is published. Here is that comparison, in full, including where the two disagree.
| Site | Checked against | Distance | Months | Average gap | Widest gap |
|---|
Sources, and what they cannot tell you.
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No site is described in prose here, and that is deliberate. There is no sourced, licence-clear dataset of what Karnak feels like at dawn. Writing that would mean inventing atmosphere and setting it beside measured temperatures, where a reader would reasonably take it to be equally sourced. So each place shows what the data holds — where it is, how high, how hot each month, whether UNESCO lists it — and stops there.
Nothing here is a recommendation. “The best time to visit” depends on your tolerance for heat, your budget and how much you mind crowds, none of which are in any dataset. The measurement is shown; the judgement is yours.
The list of sites is ours. These — places were chosen as the ones a first-time visitor is realistically choosing between, which is an editorial call, not a ranking derived from data. Egypt has hundreds of significant sites; the gazetteer holds every one OpenStreetMap has mapped.