Luxor is a city of mornings: four of them, in order

Luxor is two cities with a river between them, and the river is not the problem. The clock is. Everything worth seeing on the west bank - the royal tombs, the terraces of Deir el-Bahari, the painted courts of Medinet Habu - sits in a treeless strip of desert that opens at first light, fills with coaches through the middle of the day, and bakes even in January. Everything worth seeing on the east bank is lit after dark and far better then than at noon. Plan Luxor in days and you will spend its best hours in a minibus. Plan it in mornings and the city opens up.

So, to the question of how long: four mornings, which in practice means three full days plus the half-days either side of them. Luxor is cheap by the standards of almost anywhere a traveller flies from, and that matters to the arithmetic here - the extra night that turns a rushed two-day visit into an unhurried four-morning one costs less than a mid-range dinner in Europe. Buy the night.

How many days Luxor is actually worth

One day is a raid, not a visit. You will see the Valley of the Kings and Deir el-Bahari, you will be back across the river by lunch with your shirt stuck to your back, and you will have skipped the two or three sites that visitors most often say afterwards they liked best. Two days is the honest minimum: one bank each, nothing wasted, nothing spare. Three days is what most packaged itineraries sell, and it works - provided you accept that a balloon flight will eat one of those mornings whole.

Four mornings is the version that stops feeling like a schedule. Two mornings of monuments on the west bank, one for the balloon or for a slower second pass at whatever you rushed, one for Karnak, and - the part no itinerary advertises - four afternoons you are not expected to do anything with at all.

Winter is the season the records favour, and the numbers explain why: December and January in Luxor run to roughly 23-24C by day, with nights that can fall towards single figures before dawn. Pleasant is not the same as mild. A 2pm sun in January is still a sun you want to be indoors from, which is the whole basis of the plan below.

A fifth day only earns its keep if temples are the reason you came. More on that at the end.

Morning one: the Valley of the Kings, and which three tombs

Be at the gate when it opens, which in winter is at about first light. The crowd curve here is well documented by local guides and painfully easy to confirm in person: the valley is quiet until around eight, solid from roughly ten until two, and quiet again for the last hour or two before closing. In our view no other single decision improves a Luxor itinerary as much as getting up for this one.

The standard ticket - expect somewhere around EGP 750 for a foreign adult, roughly half that on a student card - admits you to three tombs chosen from a rotating open list. Lately that list has run to KV1 (Ramesses VII), KV2 (Ramesses IV), KV6 (Ramesses IX), KV8 (Merenptah), KV11 (Ramesses III), KV14 (Tausret and Setnakht), KV15 (Seti II), KV16 (Ramesses I), KV43 (Thutmose IV) and KV47 (Siptah). Which of them are open changes for conservation reasons, so choose on the day from the board rather than from a blog. If they are available, Ramesses IV for its astronomical ceiling and surviving blue, Tausret and Setnakht for the sheer descending scale of the thing, and Ramesses IX make a strong three.

Three tombs sit outside the standard ticket. KV9, shared by Ramesses V and Ramesses VI, costs around EGP 220 extra and is the supplement almost every guidebook tells you to pay; the ceiling is the reason. KV62, Tutankhamun's, runs to roughly EGP 700 and is a small, plain chamber whose real interest is that the king himself is still lying in it - go knowing that, and you will not be disappointed. KV17, Seti I, is in the region of EGP 2,000, which is not a misprint, and is widely rated by Egyptologists as the finest decorated tomb in the valley.

A tram covers the stretch from the visitor centre for about EGP 20 return, after which it is an uphill walk to the tomb mouths. Inside, the tombs are hotter than the open valley and get hotter the deeper you descend; the long ones are a real effort in any season. Recent visitors report that the separate camera permit has been dropped, but assume nothing and ask at the gate.

From the valley, carry straight on to Deir el-Bahari - Hatshepsut's terraces, stacked against the cliff - and finish at the Colossi of Memnon, which take ten minutes and sit on the road out anyway. That is a morning. Stop there.

Morning two: the west bank nobody queues for

The second west bank morning is the one that converts people, and it is quieter than the first precisely because none of it is on the standard coach circuit.

Start at Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of Ramesses III, again at opening. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities lists it as opening early and closing in the late afternoon, and entry costs the equivalent of a few dollars. Allow ninety minutes, or two hours if painted surfaces interest you, because this is the site on the west bank most often singled out for surviving colour - deep reds and blues still sitting in the sunk relief of the first court, where almost everywhere else has bleached to stone.

Deir el-Medina next: the village where the men who cut the royal tombs actually lived, with their own tombs on the slope above it for around EGP 220. Sennedjem's and Inherkhau's are small, intensely painted and worth the stoop. Then the Tombs of the Nobles at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, where a basic ticket covers three and the tombs are kept locked - a guard will wander over and ask which you want opened. Sennefer's, nicknamed the tomb of the vines for its ceiling, and Rekhmire's are the two most often recommended.

If the morning still has room, add the Ramesseum for the toppled colossus that gave Shelley his Ozymandias, and Carter House, the mudbrick dig house where Howard Carter was living in 1922 and a museum since 2009. On its grounds stands a full-scale facsimile of Tutankhamun's burial chamber, built from laser scans by the Madrid workshop Factum Arte. Several travel writers argue it is the better of the two experiences; at the very least it is the cheaper one, and seeing it lets you decide honestly whether to buy the real tomb's supplement at all.

Hire a taxi for the whole morning rather than site by site, and agree the price before you get in. The west bank sites are much further apart than a map suggests, and there is no shade between any of them.

The balloon morning, and why to book it early

The balloon is the rare add-on that genuinely changes what you understand. From a few hundred metres up, the thing that is invisible from the ground becomes obvious: the temples are a single line pressed against the foot of the cliff, the cultivation stops at a hard green edge, and the desert takes over within the width of a field. It is also the only way to see Deir el-Bahari in proper relation to the valley behind the ridge.

Pickup is brutally early. Operators typically collect from east bank hotels in the small hours, well before dawn, in order to cross by boat and inflate in the dark. Flights last about forty-five minutes. Expect to pay somewhere in the range of USD 50 to 100 per person depending on operator, basket size and season, with the winter months sitting at the top of that.

Two planning points, both learned the hard way by people who did not plan. Winter dawn in Luxor can be genuinely cold - towards single figures - and you will be standing in a field in it waiting for an envelope to fill, so take a layer you would not otherwise have packed. And flights are scrubbed for wind rather more often than the brochures imply, so book for the first available morning of your stay rather than the last. That spare morning is the strongest practical argument for four rather than three.

Morning three: Karnak at opening, and the avenue back to town

Karnak is not a temple. It is a precinct of accumulated temples, enclosures, pylons and chapels built and rebuilt over something like two thousand years, and the standard mistake is treating it as an hour between the hotel and lunch. Allow two to three hours, and spend them either at opening or in the last couple of hours of the afternoon.

The Great Hypostyle Hall is the set piece, but the parts people tend to remember are quieter: the sacred lake, the upper section of Hatshepsut's fallen obelisk lying on its side where the carving sits at eye level, and the Open Air Museum at the back, which needs its own ticket and is usually close to empty.

Then walk back into town along the Avenue of Sphinxes. The processional road between Karnak and Luxor Temple - about 2.7km, lined with something over a thousand sphinxes and ram-headed figures - reopened in November 2021 after decades of excavation, and the full length is now walkable. It takes around three quarters of an hour at a dawdle. There is essentially no shade, so treat it strictly as a cool-hours activity; and doing it on foot rather than by taxi is what makes it obvious that Karnak and Luxor Temple were ever one site.

The evenings belong to the east bank

Luxor Temple stays open into the evening - typically until around nine - and the ticket, in the region of EGP 400, allows re-entry the same evening. Use that properly: read the walls in daylight, go away and eat, then come back for the lighting, which turns the colonnade of Amenhotep III into something close to a different building. Look for the Roman painted plaster in the chapel behind the sanctuary, Alexander's barque shrine, and the mosque of Abu el-Haggag perched partway up the first court - a working mosque, sitting on the accumulated debris that buried the temple for centuries, and the single clearest illustration in Egypt of how deep these sites were lost.

The Karnak sound and light show divides opinion sharply. The narration is dated and theatrical, and nearly everyone who recommends it does so for the same reason: you walk through the hypostyle hall lit from below with almost nobody else in it. Decide on that basis rather than on the script.

The Luxor Museum is small, superbly edited and, in winter, reopens for an evening session from around five. If you have time for one museum here, make it this one rather than the Mummification Museum, which also keeps evening hours and is a twenty-minute curiosity.

Which bank to sleep on

The two banks solve different problems. The east bank has the restaurants, the museums, the station, the ferry and the lit temples. The west bank has the monuments and the silence, and it puts you fifteen minutes from the Valley of the Kings gate at six in the morning, when the ferry has barely started running.

With four mornings, the split that works is two nights on each. On the east bank, the Sofitel Winter Palace is the historic choice - opened in 1886, with large gardens buffering it from the corniche and rates that typically start somewhere around EUR 180; the Steigenberger Nile Palace along the same riverfront usually prices lower and has the bigger pool complex. On the west bank, Al Moudira is the Relais et Chateaux property out towards the desert edge, 54 individually built rooms, roughly USD 250 to 500 a night, with a kitchen garden it genuinely cooks from. Far cheaper and arguably more in keeping with the setting: the Marsam, put up in the 1920s as a dig house for the University of Chicago's expedition and still mudbrick, with rooms in the rough range of EUR 35 to 160. Beit Sabee sits in a village just past Medinet Habu, Nour el Gourna is near the ticket office, and Gezira Garden is a couple of minutes from the ferry landing.

Where to eat, and when it fits

Food slots neatly into the gaps the heat creates. Lunch on the west bank, after a monument morning: Africa Restaurant and Sunflower, both in Gezira, do the top-floor-terrace version of Egyptian home cooking, the latter known for its stuffed quail and duck and a camel tagine. Nile Valley Hotel's roof terrace, a couple of minutes from the ferry landing, is the convenient one and looks straight back across at Luxor Temple.

Dinner is an east bank business. Sofra, in Al Manshiya, occupies a 1930s house with a rooftop about fifteen minutes' walk from Luxor Temple, and is the sit-down Egyptian meal to make a reservation for - mezze, tagines, the whole spread. Al-Sahaby Lane is nearer the temple with a roof that overlooks it, which makes it the obvious first-night or last-night choice rather than the one to save.

Luxor's low prices show up most clearly here. A full table for two with juices typically lands below what a single main course costs in a European capital, and the counter food in the souq lanes - ful, taamiya, koshari - costs very little and is better than that would suggest. If you are staying out at Al Moudira, eat there at least once; the garden is the point of the place.

Getting there, and getting across

Luxor has an international airport a short drive east of the centre, with flights from Cairo taking around an hour and seasonal direct services from several European cities. The alternative is the train: the Cairo to Luxor run takes roughly ten to eleven hours, with sleeper services that leave in the evening and arrive in time for breakfast, which is a reasonable way to spend a night you were going to spend somewhere anyway.

In town, taxis are plentiful and unmetered - agree a number before you get in, and hire by the half-day for the west bank rather than renegotiating at every temple gate. The public ferry leaves from in front of the Luxor Museum, not from the older landing by the temple, and crosses in about ten minutes; expect to pay around EGP 20 each way, cash only, and bring small notes. It goes when it fills or when enough time has passed. Private motorboats wait alongside and will cross on demand for a negotiated fare, which is money well spent at dawn before the ferry has woken up.

What to leave out

Do not attempt both banks in one day. The west bank wants the morning and the east bank is better after dark; crossing twice through the middle of the day is exactly how people come away remembering Luxor as exhausting rather than extraordinary.

Skip the alabaster workshop and the ten minutes on a camel that get bolted onto west bank tours. They are commission stops, and they cost you the cool end of the morning.

And think hard about the Dendera and Abydos day trip. Both temples are remarkable - Dendera for the Hathor ceiling and its restored colour, Abydos for the Osireion and the king list - but taken together they make a ten-hour day with roughly six hours of it inside a car, since Abydos is about 170km north of Luxor and close to three hours each way. If temples are the reason you flew, take it. If you only have a spare half-day, go to Dendera alone, which is around 77km and comfortably under two hours each way, then spend the rest of the afternoon on a felucca drifting towards Banana Island with the sail up and nothing at all on the schedule. That is the fifth day Luxor actually deserves.