Haifa's history is stacked vertically: Phoenician purple-dye vats at sea level, Elijah's cave in the cliff, a Carmelite monastery above it, then Ottoman and Bauhaus quarters climbing the slope. Three days trace it from Bronze Age tell to 1948.
Coastal mound where Phoenician, Israelite, Byzantine and Crusader layers sit on top of each other. Byzantine mosaic pavements and rock-cut purple-dye installations survive on the shore; the tell is unfenced, open all hours and free.
Grotto at the foot of the Carmel cliff where tradition places the prophet Elijah's refuge from King Ahab, venerated by Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze. Byzantine and medieval pilgrim graffiti covers the walls; separate entrances for men and women.
Order headquarters rebuilt in 1836 over a Byzantine chapel and a small cave shrine, with a painted dome showing Elijah ascending in his chariot. In the forecourt a stone pyramid marks the French soldiers abandoned here when Napoleon retreated from Acre in 1799.
Archaeology collection built around the Ma'agan Michael ship, a 2,400-year-old merchant vessel raised off the Carmel coast and reassembled plank by plank, alongside Phoenician glass, Canaanite bronzes and a wing of Jewish ritual objects.
The museum is built around the Af Al Pi Chen, a landing craft that ran 434 Holocaust survivors past the British blockade in 1947 and now sits welded into the building. Inside are Palyam frogman gear, seized radio sets and the Dakar submarine memorial.
Terraced garden opened in 1953 carrying Haifa's memorial to the fallen, looking straight down the slope where the Haganah's Operation Bi'ur Hametz took the lower city in April 1948 and most of the Arab population left by sea.
Israel's science museum occupies the neoclassical Technikum, designed by Alexander Baerwald and finished in 1912. Its planned German-language teaching set off the 1913 War of the Languages, which fixed Hebrew as the language of Jewish education.
Hadar was laid out from 1920 as the first planned Jewish quarter on the mountain, and Herzl, Balfour and HaNevi'im streets still carry curved balconies, thermometer windows and the 1930s Beit HaKranot block at the corner.
Reconstructed British internment camp 20km south, where Jewish immigrants caught running the blockade were held from 1939 to 1948 behind watchtowers and barbed wire. The disinfection hut and wooden barracks are preserved; a Palmach raid freed 208 detainees in October 1945.
Ottoman-era Arab quarter of vaulted stone houses, emptied in 1948, resettled by Mizrahi immigrants, and the flashpoint of the July 1959 riots that put Israel's ethnic divide on the front page. Much still stands half-restored above Paris Square.
Founded in 1963 in a stone house on the seam between Hadar and the Arab quarters, it runs an archive and gallery on Haifa's shared civic life, plus the walking route mapping Arab-owned buildings that survived 1948.
Hilltop neighbourhood settled by Ahmadiyya Muslims from Punjab in the 1920s, the community's only centre in the Middle East. The white twin-minaret Mahmood Mosque was completed in 1984 and its guides explain the sect's break with mainstream Islam.