During last century, Cairo's northern suburbs swallowed up villages and farmland and expanded far into the desert to form a great arc of residential neighbourhoods stretching from the Nile to the Muqattam. Heliopolis , with its handsome boulevards and Art Deco villas, is still favoured above the satellite suburbs that have mushroomed in recent decades, and retains a sizeable foreign community. Otherwise, tourists usually only venture into Abbassiya for the Sinai Bus Terminal, or to visit the Coptic Patriarchate and Sakakini Palace, and you have to be fanatically keen to bother hunting down the Virgin's Tree in Matariyya , Sadat's tomb in Medinet Nasr , or Mamluke edifices in Bulaq .