Luxor Temple Tours & Tickets

Luxor Temple is the one you can walk to. It stands in the middle of the modern town, a few steps off the Corniche, hemmed in by streets and cafés, and that setting is not a compromise. It is the point. Almost every other great Egyptian temple sits out in the desert or across the river. This one has never stopped being in the middle of a living city, and people have been worshipping on the spot continuously for roughly three and a half thousand years.

It was built mainly by Amenhotep III in the fourteenth century BC and extended by Ramesses II, who added the entrance pylon, the forecourt and the colossal statues of himself at the front. Unlike the temples on the west bank it was not built for a dead king. It was built for the living one: the place where the ruler's divine essence was renewed each year, which made it less a mausoleum than a coronation hall used over and over.

The mosque on the roof

The strangest and best thing about Luxor Temple is visible before you buy a ticket. Halfway up the wall of the forecourt, apparently floating, is the doorway of a mosque.

The Abu el-Haggag mosque has stood here since the thirteenth century, built on top of the temple when the courtyard below was buried under centuries of debris. When archaeologists dug the temple out in the twentieth century they took the ground away from under the mosque but left the mosque, because it was and is a working place of worship. Its original door now opens onto a drop of several metres.

Stand in the court and read the stack. Pharaonic temple at the bottom. Then a Roman military chapel, its Christian-era frescoes painted over Egyptian reliefs and still faintly visible. Then a church. Then a mosque that is still in use today, with a congregation that arrives for prayers while tourists photograph the columns below. Very few buildings anywhere show three religions and two millennia in one elevation.

Are Karnak and Luxor Temple the same place?

No, and the question is common enough to answer plainly. They are two separate temples about three kilometres apart, connected by a processional road.

Karnak is enormous, out at the northern edge of town, and takes two to three hours. Luxor Temple is compact, in the centre, and takes an hour. Karnak is the estate of the god Amun. Luxor Temple is where his statue went to visit each year, carried in procession down the avenue between them during the Opet Festival, which was the main religious event of the Theban year.

That avenue, lined with sphinxes, was buried under the modern town for centuries. It was excavated over decades and reopened in 2021, so for the first time in a very long time you can walk the full processional route between the two temples. It is a long, hot, flat walk in full sun and almost nobody does the whole thing, but the Luxor Temple end is worth a few hundred metres for the sense of scale.

The missing obelisk

Two obelisks once stood at the entrance. One is still there. The other is in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, given to France in the 1830s, which is why the pylon looks subtly unbalanced and why the temple appears in two cities at once.

The colossal seated statues of Ramesses II at the front have been progressively restored and re-erected, so the facade you see now is closer to its ancient state than it was twenty years ago.

Go at night

This is the practical advice that matters most and the reason to plan around it. Luxor Temple stays open into the evening and is lit after dark, and the lighting is genuinely good: the columns of the Amenhotep colonnade throw shadows up their own shafts, the stone warms, and the crowds thin.

The town is right there, so you can eat on the Corniche and walk in afterwards. If you are on a cruise moored at Luxor, an evening visit costs you nothing from your daytime schedule and is the easiest good decision on the whole itinerary.

An hour is enough. Ninety minutes if you linger in the colonnade.

Is Luxor Temple worth it after Karnak?

Yes, and they are not interchangeable. Karnak is about scale and accumulation, a site so large it stops registering as a building. Luxor Temple is about proportion. It is small enough to hold in your head, the colonnade is one of the most elegant spaces the Egyptians built, and the layered history in the courtyard tells a story Karnak does not.

If you only have time for one, take Karnak. If you have an evening free, take Luxor Temple after dark, which is when it is better than Karnak.