Al-Gawhara Palace

Al-Gawhara Palace (Arabic: قصر الجوهرة Qaṣr al-Gawhara), also known as Bijou Palace, is a palace and museum in Cairo, Egypt. The palace is situated south of the Mosque of Muhammad Ali in the Cairo Citadel. It was commissioned by Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1814.

The palace was designed and constructed by artisans contracted from a variety of countries, including Greeks, Turks, Bulgarians and Albanians. The artisans constructed a variety of elements as part of the palace complex: "barracks, schools, an arsenal, a gun-powder factory and a mint." The palace was constructed as a two-storey pavilion in the style of a Turkish kushk. It has Western style windows which were often topped with an oval oeil-de-boeuf. The French architect and engineer Pascal Coste was employed to add the residential quarters for the palace servants and functionaries. On one side of the palace was a haush (courtyard) and on the other, were views of the pyramids and the Nile.

In 1822, a fire destroyed the palace's wooden construction in a blaze that lasted for 2 days. Later, Muhammad Ali had the structure expanded and elaborated upon with the construction of "a large marble fountain, columned stone terraces and porticoes, parterres of flower beds and orange groves, and even a menagerie containing a lion, two tigers and an elephant, a gift of the British Lord Hastings."

Texto adaptado de «Al-Gawhara Palace» en la Wikipedia en inglés, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Al-Gawhara Palace ranks #2135 of 5793 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #13 of the 26 mapped in Egipto. Fundado en 1814, más antiguo que el 14% de los monumentos datados del atlas — one of 407 atlas entries founded in the siglo XIX. Compara el dato en las estadísticas de castillos.

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