Egypt Is Moving Out Of Cairo

Many countries, like the United States, don’t have their most famous or historic city as their capital. This occurs for many reasons, but what happens when a county wants to replace its capital?

As it happens, Egypt’s government just revealed a plan which proposes moving the country’s capital from Cairo after almost 1000 years, mostly due to Cairo being overpopulated.

When Things Get Too Crowded

The main reason behind this decision, as the government of this African country claims, is that Cairo has become too congested.

Fact is there are over 18 million people in the country’s current capital, and that number is expected to grow even further in the future.

So, to avoid problems, officials devised a plan where they would move the capital to an unnamed 150 square miles area.

This would give home to 7 million people, and would enable the country to build over 2,000 new schools and hospitals and an international airport that would make Heathrow look like a cornfield.

But At What Price?

The plan seems to have big upsides to it, but you can be certain that will cost the country a lot. To be more precise, it will cost about $45 billion, as the Egyptian Minister of Housing suggested at Sharm el-Sheikh recently.

This isn’t the first time a country implemented this kind of change. About 50 years ago, Brazil did the same thing by moving its capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia, although it’s still believed that the Brazilian government did this to make its capital more isolated.

The situation in Egypt is far from ideal, with the recent political storms involved overthrowing the president which almost led to a civil war. With that in mind, we can expect more disputes regarding the government’s latest decision, especially when there’s $45 billion involved.