A Walk Down Saad Zaghloul Street: Raml Station and the Café Century

A short walking guide to the heart of downtown Alexandria: Raml Station, Saad Zaghloul Square, the Corniche, and the century-old patisserie at number 46.

If Alexandria has a living room, it is the few hundred metres between Raml Station and the sea. Here is how to walk it, and where to stop.

Start at Raml Station

Mahattat el-Raml is the tram terminus that has anchored downtown since the nineteenth century; Alexandria's tram is among the oldest in Africa. The square around it fills from early morning with commuters, students and the smell of coffee. The Greek confectioners of the 1900s set up here for a reason: everyone passed.

Saad Zaghloul Square

Walk toward the sea and the street opens into the square named for the nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul, whose statue by the sculptor Mahmoud Mokhtar faces the Mediterranean. The buildings around it are a catalogue of early twentieth-century Alexandria: Italianate façades, art deco corners, the great hotels of the interwar years.

Number 46

On Saad Zaghloul Street itself, at number 46, is Délices. The storefront in the old photographs, Patisserie Délices in Latin script and Arabic side by side, is the same address. Inside, the working museum holds the shop's first telephone, its registers and early menus. Order a Greek coffee and a mille-feuille and take a wicker chair outside.

The same marble counter, the same street, since 1922.

The Corniche

End at the water. The Corniche runs the length of the city, and from the square you can see the Eastern Harbour curve toward the Citadel of Qaitbay, built on the site of the ancient lighthouse. It is the view the first customers of Délices had, and it has not changed much.

Practical notes

Délices is open daily from 8 AM to 1 AM. Mornings are quiet, late afternoons are the city's own hour, and evenings in summer run past midnight. The walk takes twenty minutes without stops and a whole afternoon with them.