Baron Empain Palace
A Hindu-temple mansion in the middle of Heliopolis — the Belgian baron's Angkor-inspired dream, restored and reopened in 2020.
The baron who built a city
Édouard Empain, a Belgian engineer, industrialist and financier who made his fortune building railways and tramways across Europe — including work on the Paris Métro — arrived in Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1906 his company acquired a stretch of desert north-east of Cairo and began to build a new garden city there, Heliopolis, named after the ancient sun city that once stood nearby, linked to the capital by an electric railway. In 1907 he received the title of baron. As his own residence he commissioned the French architect Alexandre Marcel, known for his fantasies of Indian and East Asian architecture since the Paris Exposition of 1900, who built the palace between 1907 and 1911 on the eastern edge of the new town.
A temple in concrete
The palace, also known as the Palais Hindou, is one of the most unusual buildings in Egypt. Built in reinforced concrete, it draws on the great Khmer temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia for its massing and stepped central tower, and on the Hindu temples of Odisha (Orissa) in India for its carved figures and ornament: its façades are covered with elephants, serpents, Hindu deities, dancers and mythical creatures, while the interior combined European and oriental décor. Legend says that the central tower turned slowly on rails so that the house followed the sun all day; it is one of many stories that have gathered around the building. Empain lived here through the 1910s and 1920s; after his death in 1929 he was buried in the Basilica of Heliopolis nearby.
Abandonment and restoration
After the family's departure, the palace stood empty for decades. Its locked doors, overgrown garden and strange silhouette made it the subject of countless rumours of ghosts and secret rituals, and a magnet for Cairo's imagination. It was registered as a national monument in 1993. A restoration by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, carried out with the support of the Belgian embassy and civil society, began in 2017; the palace was reopened by the Egyptian president on 30 June 2020 as a museum and cultural venue, with exhibitions on the history of Heliopolis and its founder. From the roof terrace there are views across the district.
Exhibo editorial
Heliopolis is a district of arcades, tramlines and Belle Époque balconies — and then, on a roundabout among villas and cafés, a pink-grey Khmer temple bristling with elephants and gods. Nobody who grew up in Cairo has a neutral feeling about this house: for half a century it was the city's favourite haunted mansion, locked, dark, whispered about.
Now you can walk in. Go up to the roof terrace in the late afternoon, when the carved figures throw long shadows and the light turns the concrete gold, and look out over the garden city the baron conjured from the desert. It is eccentric, theatrical and slightly absurd — and impossible not to love.
How to find it
The palace stands on Al-Orouba Street (the airport road) in Heliopolis, set back in its own garden; taxis and ride-hailing drivers know it as Qasr al-Baron. Enter through the garden gate, buy tickets at the kiosk and walk up to the main entrance; the stairs to the roof terrace are inside. The Basilica of Heliopolis and the arcades of the Korba district are a short drive or a longer walk to the west.
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