The story
El Borsa Square at the mouth of the Mahmoudiya, where Egypt’s cotton was bought and sold.
- 1El Borsa Square
- 2A building on the heritage register as no. 535
- 3Mina El Basal’s cotton heritage
The district’s page on the governorate portal lists “El Borsa Square in Mina El Basal” among the district’s main squares, and Masrawy (2019) places the exchange at the mouth of the Mahmoudiya canal in Mina El Basal, near the gates of Alexandria’s harbour.
Read more
El Watan (2025), quoting an official of the antiquities awareness office in Alexandria, says the exchange was founded in 1872, built by the Italian engineer Pietro Avoscani for Khedive Ismail on more than 8,000 square metres, and that the building is on the architectural heritage register as no. 535. Al-Dostor (2019) dates the first cotton sales at Mina El Basal to 1879.
According to Masrawy, the exchange and most of the cotton warehouses closed after the July revolution and the nationalisations that followed. Al-Dostor says the building now holds the offices of six cotton exporting companies.
We know of no free photograph of it yet, nor a verified point for the building on the map, so it appears here as a line drawing and without a pin.