Baron Empain Palace

A Belgian industrialist’s desert fantasy — and the strangest silhouette on the Heliopolis skyline.

When Baron Édouard Empain arrived in 1904 to build a whole new city in the desert north-east of Cairo, he raised himself a palace unlike anything around it. Designed by the French architect Alexandre Marcel and finished in 1911, the Palais Hindou borrows from the temples of India and the Khmer ruins of Angkor Wat — carved elephants, serpents and dancing deities climbing its façade.

For decades it stood abandoned and wrapped in ghost stories — a tower said to rotate to follow the sun, a baron who never left. Restored and opened to the public in 2020, it is now one of the few grand houses of early Heliopolis you can actually walk through.