The four-star Steigenberger Cecil Hotel in

Alexandria Alexandria ( or ; ar, ٱلْإِسْكَنْدَرِيَّةُ ; grc-gre, Αλεξάνδρεια, Alexándria) is the second largest city in Egypt, and the largest city on the Mediterranean coast. Founded in by Alexander the Great, Alexandria ...

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...

, was built as the Cecil Hotel in 1929 by the French-Egyptian Jewish Metzger family as a romantic hotel, at

Saad Zaghloul Saad Zaghloul ( ar, سعد زغلول / ; also ''Sa'd Zaghloul Pasha ibn Ibrahim'') (July 1859 – 23 August 1927) was an Egyptian revolutionary and statesman. He was the leader of Egypt's nationalist Wafd Party. He led a civil disobedience ...

square where

Cleopatra's needles Cleopatra's Needles are a separated pair of ancient Egyptian obelisks now in London and New York City. The obelisks were originally made in Heliopolis (modern Cairo) during the New Kingdom period, inscribed by the 18th dynasty pharaoh Thutmose ...

had been, in front of the

Corniche A corniche is a road on the side of a cliff or mountain, with the ground rising on one side and falling away on the other. The word has been absorbed into English from the French term ' or "road on a ledge", originally derived from the Itali ...

. Author

Somerset Maugham William Somerset Maugham ( ; 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German un ...

stayed here, as did

Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 Winston Churchill in the Second World War, dur ...

and

Al Capone Alphonse Gabriel Capone (; January 17, 1899 – January 25, 1947), sometimes known by the nickname "Scarface", was an American gangster and businessman who attained notoriety during the Prohibition era as the co-founder and boss of the ...

. Moreover, the

British Secret Service The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligence ...

maintained a suite for their operations. It was seized by the Egyptian government after the revolution in 1952, and five years later the Metzger family was expelled from the country. In 2007, after a lengthy court battle, legal ownership of the hotel was returned to the Metzger family, who subsequently sold it to the Egyptian government. This hotel appears in

The Alexandria Quartet ''The Alexandria Quartet'' is a tetralogy of novels by British writer Lawrence Durrell, published between 1957 and 1960. A critical and commercial success, the first three books present three perspectives on a single set of events and characters ...

, written by

Lawrence Durrell Lawrence George Durrell (; 27 February 1912 – 7 November 1990) was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. He was the eldest brother of naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell. Born in India to British colonial pare ...

and the novel Miramar by

Naguib Mahfuz Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha ( arz, نجيب محفوظ عبد العزيز ابراهيم احمد الباشا, ; 11 December 1911 – 30 August 2006) was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature. M ...

. The hotel operated for many years as the Sofitel Cecil Alexandria Hotel, until it joined the

Steigenberger Hotels Deutsche Hospitality (formerly Steigenberger Hotel Group) is the umbrella brand of the German hotel company Steigenberger Hotels AG, member of the Huazhu Group since 2020. In January 2020, Deutsche Hospitality's portfolio included a total of arou ...

chain in October, 2014.

References

External links

Official website
Hotels in Alexandria Hotels established in 1929 Hotel buildings completed in 1929 {{Africa-hotel-stub