What to do in Luxor

• The Valley of the Kings shelters New Kingdom rulers behind more than sixty tombs and another twenty left unfinished, cut into a desert valley on the west bank beneath a natural pyramid-shaped peak sacred to the goddess Hathor.
• Hatshepsut's Temple rises in three colonnaded terraces against the cliffs of Deir el-Bahari, built for the female pharaoh by her steward Senenmut and dedicated as Djeser-djeseru, directly across the Nile from Karnak.
• The Valley of the Queens holds the tombs of royal wives, princes and princesses in a side valley south of the Kings, known to the ancient Egyptians as Ta-Set-Neferu and centred today on the tomb of Queen Nefertari.
• The Colossi of Memnon stand two abreast beside the road into the west bank necropolis, all that survives above ground of Amenhotep III's mortuary temple behind them.
• The Ramesseum was Ramesses II's funerary temple, its fallen colossus of the king carved more than 17 metres tall and weighing about 1,000 tons, its walls covered with scenes from the Battle of Kadesh.
• Medinet Habu holds Ramesses III's mortuary temple, modelled on the nearby Ramesseum and widely considered one of the best preserved in the Theban Necropolis, its courtyards and colonnades still largely intact behind a mudbrick enclosure.
• The Avenue of Sphinxes linked Karnak and Luxor Temple along a processional way about 2.7 kilometres long, once lined with ram and human headed sphinxes and restored to make the walk possible again.
• Karnak Open-Air Museum gathers blocks and chapels dismantled by later pharaohs and reassembled from within Karnak's precincts, a quieter corner of the complex away from the main crowds.

Luxor occupies the site of ancient Thebes, capital of Egypt through most of the New Kingdom. Its standing temples on the east bank and its royal tombs across the river together form Ancient Thebes and its Necropolis, listed as a single UNESCO World Heritage property since 1979. Generations of pharaohs built and were buried here, and the result today is a working town wrapped around one of the country's great concentrations of pharaonic monuments.

The two banks of Thebes

The city still splits the way its priests intended: temples for the living on the east bank, tombs and mortuary temples for the dead on the west. Karnak and Luxor Temple once stood linked by the Avenue of Sphinxes, a processional route about 2.7 kilometres long, while across the river the Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut's temple sit against the same desert cliffs that sheltered New Kingdom burials for centuries.

When to go and for how long

The cooler months from November to February suit walking between open-air temples in the middle of the day; summer, from June to August, turns the desert heat punishing well before noon. Two full days cover the essentials on both banks, and a third leaves room for a hot air balloon flight over the west bank at sunrise or a slower look at the Valley of the Kings' side tombs.

Getting around

The east bank centre is walkable along the Corniche between Luxor Temple and Karnak. Reaching the west bank means crossing the Nile bridge south of town or taking the small public ferry from a landing near Luxor Museum, and once there the temples and tombs sit far enough apart that a taxi or an organised day tour covers the ground more easily than walking.

Beyond the temples

Evenings belong to the Corniche and the souk, where the tourist lanes give way to a quieter local market past Moustafa Kamel street. Dawn belongs to hot air balloons, launched before sunrise from the west bank for silent views over the Theban hills, the Valley of the Kings and the curve of the Nile below. That same Nile links Luxor to the run of top attractions in Egypt between Cairo and Aswan.