Explore Aswan

Elephantine is an island in the Nile at Aswan whose southern end holds the ruins of the ancient town of Abu, excavated by a German mission since 1969. Visitors reach it by ferry and see the temples of Khnum and Satet, a Nilometer and the Aswan Museum, which displays finds from the island.

A botanical garden covering the whole of Kitchener's Island, a narrow island in the Nile west of Elephantine at Aswan. Lord Kitchener laid it out in the early 20th century with exotic trees, many from India, and it later became a government botanical research station; visitors reach it by boat and walk its shaded paths among palms and tropical plants.

The Unfinished Obelisk lies in an ancient granite quarry in Aswan, still joined to the bedrock where workers abandoned it after the stone cracked. Probably ordered by Hatshepsut for Karnak, it would have stood about 42 m tall; walkways around the quarry let visitors see the shaft and the marks left by the stone pounders.

A necropolis cut into the cliffs on the west bank of the Nile opposite Aswan, where local governors and dignitaries of the Old and Middle Kingdoms were buried; it stayed in use until the Roman period. Visitors climb to the rock tombs, and the domed tomb of Sheikh Ali Abu al-Hawa on the summit gives the site its name.

The ruins of a Coptic monastery in the desert on Aswan's west bank, originally dedicated to Anba Hadra, a 4th-century monk and bishop of Aswan. Used from the 6th to the early 14th century, it keeps its enclosure wall, a church with remains of wall paintings, and a two-storey residential building of stone and mud brick.

Philae Temple is the temple of Isis that Ptolemy II began in the 3rd century BC, standing with the Kiosk of Trajan and a temple of Hathor. In the 1970s the UNESCO Nubia campaign moved the monuments from flooded Philae island to Agilkia island south of Aswan, which visitors reach by boat.

The Aswan High Dam was built across the Nile between 1960 and 1970 with Soviet help, about 13 km south of central Aswan. The rock-fill dam is about 3.8 km long and holds back Lake Nasser; from the road along its crest visitors look over the lake on one side and the Nile on the other, near the lotus-shaped Soviet–Egyptian friendship monument.

A sandstone temple to the Nubian god Mandulis, built under the Roman emperor Augustus and moved in 1962–63 from its flooded site about 50 km upstream to New Kalabsha, beside the High Dam about 15 km south of Aswan. It has a pylon, forecourt, hypostyle hall and sanctuary; the rock temple of Beit el-Wali and the Kertassi kiosk stand nearby.