Choose your base in Luxor

The East Bank is where most travellers sleep, eat, and catch ferries — Luxor Temple, the souq and the train station all sit here.

Green fields, mudbrick villages and the tombs of the pharaohs — quieter, cheaper, and where the boutique-hotel scene has moved.

The neighbourhood built up around Karnak Temple — a handful of quieter hotels three kilometres north of the main tourist strip.

The everyday commercial heart of Luxor — souq, banks, cheap eats, and the budget hotels the backpacker circuit still knows.

The riverfront boulevard where the big-name Nile-view hotels sit — sunsets, feluccas, and the highest prices in Luxor.

A residential neighbourhood on the northern edge of the city — cheap, quiet, and a taxi ride from anything you came to see.

A West Bank village clustered around Ramses III's mortuary temple — arguably the best-preserved colour on the West Bank.

The old village that grew on top of the Tombs of the Nobles — half moved to New Qurna, half still here, all atmosphere.

Hassan Fathy's utopian mudbrick village, built in the 1940s and now half-forgotten between the Nile and the desert.

A small farming village 20 km south of Luxor with an under-visited Ptolemaic temple and almost no other tourists.

A sugar-mill town 25 km south of Luxor, historically Hermonthis, with a scatter of Ptolemaic ruins and a working feel.

A market town 55 km south of Luxor where every Nile cruise passes through — the temple of Khnum sits sunk below the streets.

A town 115 km south of Luxor built around the most complete ancient temple in Egypt — the falcon-god Horus's home.

The provincial capital 60 km north of Luxor — a busy modern city and the gateway to Dendera temple.

The temple of Hathor, 8 km northwest of Qena — astronomical ceilings, painted crypts, and the best temple roof in Egypt.

A quiet Nile-side town 30 km north of Luxor, the type-site of Egypt's pre-dynastic Naqada cultures — for enthusiasts only.

Egypt's most sacred pilgrimage site 160 km north of Luxor, home of Osiris and the Seti I temple with the Abydos king list.

A village between Luxor and Qena famous for centuries for its distinctive ballasi water jars — a working craft, not a tourist show.

A quiet farming village on the west bank south of the main tomb area — cheap, rural, and where a few boutique guesthouses hide.

A village on the road north out of Luxor toward Qena — an occasional traveller stop, otherwise pure countryside.