Bab Zuweila

A thousand-year-old stone gate with two minarets grafted onto its towers, standing at the bottom of al-Muizz Street where the Fatimid city ended. The minarets are the reason to come: a tight spiral stair inside each, and at the top a parapet looking out over a rooftop landscape of domes, satellite dishes and washing lines that no viewpoint in Cairo matches.

Practical

• The climb is narrow, unlit in places and not for anyone uneasy on stairs — but short
• Best in the last two hours of daylight, when the stone goes orange and the call to prayer starts
• The gate is the southern end of the al-Muizz walk; start at Bab al-Futuh and finish here
• Below it, the Tentmakers' Market (Khayamiya) is the last covered medieval market in Cairo and largely tourist-free

The minarets belong to the Mosque of al-Mu'ayyad next door, built against the gate in the fifteenth century, which is why a Fatimid gate carries Mamluk towers.

Built in 1092 by the Fatimid vizier Badr al-Jamali, one of three surviving gates from the walls he raised around the caliphal city. The name comes from the Zuwayla, a Berber tribe from present-day Libya whose soldiers were quartered nearby.

It was the ceremonial gate where the sultan watched processions leave for Mecca, and the place where sentences were carried out — heads were displayed on its spikes into the nineteenth century, and the last Mamluk sultan, Tumanbay, was hanged from it in 1517 when the Ottomans took Cairo. The rope broke twice.

Sultan al-Mu'ayyad Shaykh built his mosque against the gate in 1415 and set its two minarets directly on the Fatimid towers, which is a piece of deliberate symbolism as much as economy: he had been imprisoned in the gatehouse before he came to power. A restoration completed in 2003 by the American Research Center in Egypt opened the minarets to visitors for the first time.