The historic heart of Port Said is located along the edge of the canal, on and around Sharia Palestine. Here, the waterfront seems infused with a ‘back in the good old days’ atmosphere; the streets are lined with late 19th-century and early 20th-century buildings complete with rickety wooden balconies, louvred doors and high verandahs. The raised boardwalk running all the way along Sharia Palestine affords sweeping views over the canal.
Take a stroll down Sharia Memphis past its decrepit Woolworth’s building , down Sharia al-Gomhuriyya to spot the archway entrances still announcing the Bible Society building and the old Canal Shipping Agency building , and around the streets just north of the Commercial Basin. Along Sharia Palestine there are wonderfully odd colonial remnants, including the once highly fashionable Simon Arzt department store . At the very northern end of Sharia Palestine is a large stone plinth , originally to have been the site of what's now known as the Statue of Liberty and which instead once held a statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, until it was torn down in 1956 with the nationalisation of the Suez Canal.
East of here, on Sharia 23rd of July, is the Italian consulate building , erected in the 1930s and adorned with an engraved piece of the propaganda of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini: ‘Rome – once again at the heart of an empire’.
Several blocks inland, on and around Sharia Salah Salem, there is an impressive collection of churches, including the Coptic Orthodox Church of St Bishoi of the Virgin and the Franciscan compound .
