Luxor is built on the bones of Thebes, capital of Egypt at its New Kingdom zenith, and the city still keeps the ancient logic of the Nile: the living on the sunrise east bank, the dead on the sunset west. It is often called the world's greatest open-air museum, and the claim is hard to argue with when a single town holds Karnak, the Valley of the Kings and the Temple of Hatshepsut within a few kilometres of one another.

On the east bank, Karnak is the largest religious complex ever built — its Great Hypostyle Hall a petrified forest of 134 colossal sandstone columns — and Luxor Temple anchors the modern town, breathtaking when floodlit after dark. The two were once joined by the Avenue of the Sphinxes, the 2.7-kilometre processional road grandly reopened in 2021 and now the city's headline walk. Cross to the west bank and the register changes from temple to tomb: 63 pharaohs including Tutankhamun lie in the vividly painted rock-cut chambers of the Valley of the Kings, while Hatshepsut's colonnaded terraces rise straight out of the cliffs at Deir el-Bahari and the Colossi of Memnon keep watch over the approach.

The signature Luxor experience floats above all of it: a hot-air balloon at dawn, drifting over the Theban necropolis as the first light ignites the temples, the river and the green strip of valley below. Afterwards the city slows to Nile time — a felucca to Banana Island, a tagine in a restored 1930s townhouse, a sunset on the corniche where Howard Carter once announced the find of the century.