Why it looks like this

Alexander the Great founded the city in 331 BC, and his architect laid it out on a grid — one of the earliest planned street networks in history. The modern city still runs on long streets parallel to the shore, crossed by short ones running down to the water.

Squeezed between the Mediterranean and Lake Mariout behind it, Alexandria could only grow sideways. The result is a city stretched along its Corniche seafront for around twenty kilometres, thin as a ribbon on the map.