Native Alexandrians are a proud sort. Blessed with the open sea as their backdrop and alive with a traditionally polyglot and cosmopolitan community, Egypt’s second-largest city has never settled for second-best. Even so, Alexandria has always lived in the long shadow of its former glory as an ancient cultural and intellectual epicentre, and later, as a hedonistic expatriate playground.
Perched on the corner of Saad Zaghloul Square and commanding an uninterrupted view of the eastern harbor is the grand old Cecil Hotel, a Moorish style building established in 1929.
We Went Inside Of The CECIL HOTEL, And What We Saw Will SHOCK You
Let's delve into the captivating history of this iconic hotel, from its glamorous origins to its present-day allure.
A Romantic Beginning
The four-star Cecil Hotel in Alexandria, Egypt, was built as the Cecil Hotel in 1929 by the French-Egyptian Jewish Metzger family as a romantic hotel, at Saad Zaghloul square where Cleopatra's needles had been, in front of the Corniche. Designed by Alessandro Loria, a Jewish Egyptian architect, in 1929, the hotel was considered the best in Alexandria during its first decades of existence.
It’s the 1940s, jazz is swinging in the lobby, chandeliers hang low enough to warm the collar, and the smell of freshly baked bread brings with it the overpowering undertones of lemon and whiskey. Built in 1929 by the French-Egyptian Metzger family, it was designed to be romantic-a place of elegance and delicate detailing, Genovese corner crowns and thick satin drapes.
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Alessandro Loria Born in Mansourah, Egypt, to Italian parents in 1880, Alessandro Loria lived in Tuscany and Cairo before settling in Alexandria in 1914.
History Albert Metzger, a Jewish businessman from Alsace, moved to Alexandria in the early 1900s. He became a British citizen during World War I, due to the inconvenience of having a German passport in British-occupied Egypt during the war. In 1929, he commissioned Alessandro Loria to build a hotel that he initially called the Regina Palace. Less then a year later he changed the name to the Cecil Hotel, after the Hotel Cecil in London, which had been the largest hotel in Europe when it opened in the 1890s.
Distinguished guests from King Faisal of Saudi Arabia to the likes of Noel Coward and Somerset Maugham have lingered in the Cecil’s quarters.
One of the reasons that this property has attracted such a star-studded guest list over the past century is because of it’s enviable location both in the heart of Alexandria’s stretched-out coastline and its position right on the seaside Corniche overlooking the Mediterranean.
The legacy of this era, in which some of the most celebrated writings about Alexandria are set - Lawrence Durell’s The Alexandria Quartet, the work of Greek poet Constantine Cavafy and Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Miramar - is still palpable in modern-day Alexandria, deftly blended into more familiar signposts of urban Egyptian life: the souqs (markets), cafés, restaurants and hotels. Even the residents are inimitably formed of this hybrid of cultures.
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Corniche in Alexandria.
World War II and Espionage
In the 1930s and 40s, the Cecil Hotel was regarded as the best hotel in Alexandria; the British Secret Service used it as their headquarters during World War II.
Winston Churchill was a regular at the Cecil, ordered his drinks on the rocks and his bread warm. The British Secret Service had a permanent suite from which they ordered their operations. For decades, it was home to espionage and dance, a mantelpiece of the era.
The property is perhaps most famous for being the residence and headquarters of the commander of the Allied forces in Egypt during World War II, General Montgomery, after whom the elegant bar is named - Monty’s.
Seizure and Restoration
It was only in 1952, with the advent of the Egyptian coup d’état turned revolution, that the government seized control of the Cecil Hotel; five years later, the Metzeger family were among the jewish community who were expelled from Egypt during the onset of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
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After the Egyptian revolution in 1952, the government seized the hotel and eventually incorporated it into the state-owned Egoth hotel group. Five years later, the Metzger family was expelled from Egypt. They settled in Tanzania, buying the New Africa Hotel in Dar es Salaam.
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.
In 2007, following a long and tangled legal battle, the hotel’s ownership was returned to Patricia Metzger (Albert’s granddaughter) and her two children.
The Cecil Today: Steigenberger Cecil Hotel
Since its opening in 1929, the Steigenberger Cecil Hotel in Alexandria has been captivating guests with its excellent location directly on the harbor. You benefit from short walking distances to many attractions such as the Biblioteca Alexandrina (approx. 19 min.), the Alexandria National Museum (approx. 5 min.) and the Amphitheater (approx.
Unlike other historic hotels in the center of Alexandria, the Steigenberger Cecil Hotel has been beautifully restored and is well maintained. The two historic elevators in the center of the building have a particular charm that harken back to the days when literary elites, foreign officers, and global film stars would pass you getting on and off of them.
The hotel is now affiliated with the Accor Group and has seen some ambitious, but bland restoration and refurbishing schemes. Still, the place maintains its historic sense of grandeur and has preserved some pleasant old-style features, like the old-fashioned lift and the lobby’s opulent setting.
Guest Rooms and Amenities
You will stay in 82 hotel rooms and 3 luxurious suites. All rooms at our hotel in Alexandria feature individually controlled air conditioning, TV with international channels, desk, safe, minibar and complimentary coffee and tea making facilities.
Are you looking for a meeting room in Alexandria? We offer you the ideal setting for your event with our sustainable conference concept.
The Hotel Staff
The local staff at the Steigenberger Cecil Hotel are noticeably extra friendly. The quality of a hotel isn’t always a guarantee of the quality of a hotel’s staff in Egypt, and I’ve stayed numerous of Egypt’s top hotels that charged quadruple what the Cecil charges per night but which had staff who acted as if you were checking into a prison. This hotel’s staff, however, are truly a friendly and professional bunch, no matter the time of day or night and whether they recognize you as a regular or not.
Drawbacks
The only thing that does take away from the charm of the hotel, though, is the consistently atrocious choice of evening “entertainment” in the otherwise beautiful first-floor bar. If you stumble into the bar area during the day or early evening, you’ll find a very elegant, wood-paneled room befitting a hotel as storied as the Cecil. Fortunately, the bad taste in acoustics and cheap sound equipment is also something that can easily be remedied by better management decisions. I’ve always found the bar staff to be exceptionally friendly and interactive, just as they should be in a classy historic establishment.
However, the hotel does have a few drawbacks, chief among which are the insanely loud, cheap-sounding music that plagues the otherwise-sophisticated bar after 8:30pm, as well as the hotel’s tacky policy of begging guests for online reviews at checkout.
Furthermore, I have even heard that staff performance is partially evaluated based on whether they get any personal, by-name mentions in online reviews and how many they rack up. If this is true, it would be a truly horrendous reflection on the hotel’s management and on the property’s reputation and brand.
But depending on when you’re reading this and when you’re hopefully trying out the Steigenberger Cecil Hotel in Alexandria on your upcoming trip, still do poke your head in the bar in the evening to see if things have improved.
The Cecil Hotel in Literature
This hotel appears in The Alexandria Quartet, written by Lawrence Durrell and the novel Miramar by Naguib Mahfuz.
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