Monuments Sight Seeing Attractions Ezbekiya Garden
Monuments Sight Seeing Attractions Ezbekiya Garden Before there was and Ezbekiya Garden, there was an Ezbekiya lake which was dug in the 15th century by Emir Azbak.
The lake was then transformed into a park by Mohamed Ali in 1868.
However, his grand son Khedieve Ismail commissioned Barillet Deschamps to rebuild Ezbekiya garden following the same style of the Parisian parks.
He also ordered Deschamps to transform the park into a botanical garden with collections of plants and trees from all over the world.
The result was a beautiful garden stretching over 20 feddans (84,000 sqm) with four gates, an artificial grotto and waterfalls., a small mountain cultivated with cacti, and a marble fountain decorated with botanical motifs.
Water pumps were installed to irrigate the profusion of greenery.
As for the horticultural species, the garden contained 27 families of trees, plants and shrubs and next to some thirteen species of palm trees, succulents, perennial herbs and climbers were also represented, thus making the Ezbekiya the first ever botanical garden in Egypt.
Today, Ezbekiya houses the pupet theatre, El Talia’a theatre.
Not far from the place where the swimming pool stood, stands a building that used to be the Egyptian Royal Society for Fencing.
The proximity of the Ezbekiya garden to the Nile makes it easier for the plants to flourish.
You can still find a Banyan tree as well as numerous plants and flowers, The Ezbekiya garden creates an attractive sight of Cairo; visitors will enjoy tranquility and remarkable ambiance of the garden,
The Ezbekiya Garden was once such space.
It was a time when money was being made and spent at a rapid rate and the European presence in Egypt was growing.
Khedive Ismail had the park built in 1872 as a French pleasure garden.
It featured a small lake crossed by bridges, as well as exotic trees and plants, tea rooms, restaurants and shops.
The Ezbekiya Garden
grew in popularity and, some say, vulgarity for over 50 years.
In his Dictionnaire des Coûtumes, Traditions et Expressions des Egyptiens, Ahmed Amin describes the park in its heyday: “The Ezbekiya Garden had become a rendez-vous for debauchery and was full of taverns and cabarets that produced singers of both sexes, where they smoked hash and gambled.
The place housed such vices to the point that the name Ezbekiya became synonymous with … sin.” The area just north of the gardens became Cairo’s red-light district.
