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Israel

4 city guides · Middle East

Cities in Israel (4)

Middle East
🇮🇱 Israel

Eilat

Eilat is Israel's southernmost city — a Red Sea resort at the tip of the Negev Desert, surrounded by the mountains of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It sits at the very northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba, the eastern arm of the Red Sea, where the water is exceptionally clear and warm (23–27°C year-round) with some of the finest coral reefs in the world just metres from the shore. Eilat has no rain for most of the year and over 360 days of sunshine. Day 3 explores the Petra excursion into Jordan.

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Middle East
🇮🇱 Israel

Haifa

Haifa is Israel's third city — 285,000 residents in the city itself, 924,000 in the metropolitan area — built on the steep slopes of Mount Carmel where the mountain falls directly into the Mediterranean, giving every neighbourhood a different altitude, climate, and character. The Bahá'í World Centre (the global administrative headquarters and spiritual centre of the Bahá'í Faith, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008) consists of the Shrine of the Báb (a gold-domed structure housing the tomb of the Báb, the forerunner of Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith) set within 19 formally landscaped terraces extending for 1km up the Mount Carmel slope — the most striking formal garden in the Middle East, immaculately maintained, requiring hundreds of volunteer gardeners, and visible from the German Colony below as a vertical stripe of green geometry on the hillside. Below the gardens: the German Colony (Moshava Hagermanit — a planned community built in 1868 by German Templar settlers (a Pietist Protestant sect that came to the Holy Land to await the Second Coming), now a street of restored 19th-century stone houses (Ben-Gurion Boulevard) with cafés and restaurants). Above: the Carmelite Monastery of Stella Maris (Our Lady of the Sea — the head house of the Carmelite Order, built on a cave where the prophet Elijah is said to have sheltered). Best months: April–May and October–November.

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Middle East
🇮🇱 Israel

Jerusalem

Jerusalem is the most contested and most sacred city on earth — holy to three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), the site of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Dome of the Rock. The Old City (UNESCO World Heritage) is divided into four quarters (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Armenian) within 16th-century Ottoman walls. The scale of history here is impossible to fully absorb: 3,000 years of recorded history, dozens of civilizations, and the most disputed few hundred metres of land on the planet. Three days here will change how you understand the world.

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Middle East
🇮🇱 Israel

Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is Israel's most cosmopolitan and economically dominant city (population 460,000 city, 3.9 million Greater Tel Aviv metropolitan area — the Tel Dan metropolitan area includes Jaffa, Ramat Gan and Bnei Brak and constitutes approximately 44% of Israel's total population), on the Mediterranean coast 60 km northwest of Jerusalem. The city was founded in 1909 as a Jewish suburb of the ancient port city of Jaffa (Yafo) — the first modern Jewish city in history; the name derives from Nahum Sokolow's Hebrew translation of Theodor Herzl's Zionist novel "Altneuland" (1902) — "Tel" (the ancient hill of accumulated layers of civilisation) + "Aviv" (spring) = the old-new land. The most architecturally significant district is the White City (Ha'ir Ha'lv'na — UNESCO World Heritage 2003): the collection of approximately 4,000 buildings constructed in the International Style (Bauhaus and related Modernist movements) between 1930 and 1950, the largest concentration of Bauhaus-influenced architecture in the world, built by Jewish architects who fled Nazi Germany (many were students of Walter Gropius at the Dessau Bauhaus) and applied the European modernist architecture principles to the Mediterranean climate context (the white-painted concrete, the horizontal strip windows for sun control, the pilotis (ground-level columns) to allow air circulation). Tel Aviv's contemporary identity is defined by the beach (14 km of Mediterranean sandy beach stretching from Jaffa in the south to the Herzliya marina in the north — the city has the most visited urban beaches in the Middle East), the food scene (the most diverse restaurant scene in the Middle East, with Israeli-Arab fusion, the shakshuka and hummus tradition, and the global fine dining that has made Tel Aviv one of the top 10 food cities in the world by multiple international rankings), and the nightlife (Tel Aviv is consistently ranked among the top 5 nightlife cities in the world).

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