Baron Empain Palace

A Hindu-Cambodian temple, in reinforced concrete, in a Cairo suburb. There is nothing else like it in Egypt, or arguably anywhere — a compact palace bristling with elephants, serpents, dancing figures and Buddhas, modelled on Angkor Wat and on the temples of eastern India, and built for a Belgian industrialist in 1911.

It reopened in 2020 after a long restoration, and the interior is now a museum about Heliopolis itself: how the suburb was planned, financed and built. The house is the exhibit, though — go for the building.

Look for

• The exterior sculpture, which repays slow walking: figures from Hindu and Buddhist iconography carved into a European villa plan
• The domed tower, said to have been mounted on a mechanism so it could be rotated to follow the sun
• The spiral stair, the basement, and the restored terrace

Édouard Empain was a Belgian engineer and financier who built tram and metro systems across Europe — his company built much of the Paris Métro. He arrived in Egypt in 1904 on railway business and stayed to attempt something larger: buying a stretch of empty desert north-east of Cairo and building a city on it.

That city is Heliopolis. Empain's company laid out the streets, ran a tram line to central Cairo, built apartment blocks, a hotel, a racecourse and a basilica, and sold the plots. It was one of the most ambitious private urban developments of its era, and it worked — Heliopolis is now an established Cairo district of considerable size.

He built this palace for himself at the edge of it, and he is buried in the basilica he commissioned nearby.

Why it looks like this

The architect was the Frenchman Alexandre Marcel, a specialist in exactly this kind of orientalist pastiche, who had built Cambodian and Japanese pavilions for world fairs. Empain seems to have wanted something spectacular and un-Egyptian in a suburb otherwise designed in a Moorish-revival style — a personal landmark rather than a contribution to the scheme.

The haunted years

The palace stood empty for decades, was stripped, and acquired an enormous reputation locally as a cursed or haunted house — stories of black masses, a sister who fell from the balcony, blood on the walls. None of it holds up, and the restoration has largely replaced the ghost stories with guided tours. Some Cairenes preferred the ghost stories.