Cairo

Introduction

Located on the banks of the Nile River, Cairo is Africa's largest city, as well as the largest city in the Arab world. In the course of its thousand-year history it has been the capital of the great Egyptian dynasties of the Middle Ages, a British colonial enclave, and a modern industrialized city. Today it is a teeming, vibrant national capital with one of the world's highest population densities per square mile. Even as the city struggles with the social and environmental effects of overcrowding, it dominates Egypt politically, economically, and culturally and remains a prime tourist destination in spite of a campaign of terrorist activity by Islamic extremists seeking to destabilize the country's government.