The country
From the Golan to the Red Sea
Israel is smaller than New Jersey and holds a desert, a rift valley, an alpine north and 170 miles of Mediterranean coast. These are the ten places that between them cover it.
Destinations
10
each with its own page
Sites covered
107
each with a page of its own
North to south
259 km
161 miles between the ends
Practical guides
40
eating, sleeping, arriving, timing
Citations
237
opened and checked
Where everything is
The whole country is a morning's drive
Plotted at true latitude, so the distances on this axis are real ones. Click any name to open its page.
The ten
Every destination, north to south
Each page covers what the place is, what to see, how to reach it, when to go, and what it costs, with the sources printed at the bottom.
Northern Israel
The Galilee
Israel's green quarter: oak hills and basalt vineyards, a mystics' town high in the north, a Crusader capital buried under an Ottoman port, and half a billion birds passing overhead each year.
11 sites with their own page8 sourced figures28 citations
Mount Carmel and Haifa Bay
Haifa
Israel's third city climbs a mountain: a World Heritage garden staircase on Mount Carmel, a working port at its foot, and a mixed Jewish and Arab downtown in between.
11 sites with their own page8 sourced figures22 citations
Lower Galilee and the Jordan Rift…
The Sea of Galilee
A harp-shaped lake more than 200 metres below sea level, ringed by basalt hills, gospel ruins and a water gauge the whole country reads.
10 sites with their own page8 sourced figures32 citations
Mediterranean coast
Caesarea
Herod poured a harbour into open water here, using volcanic ash shipped from the Bay of Naples. Most of it now lies more than five metres down.
11 sites with their own page8 sourced figures19 citations
Central Mediterranean coast
Tel Aviv
A city laid out on empty dunes in 1909 that now runs on four thousand white apartment blocks, fourteen kilometres of seafront and an economy built on software.
11 sites with their own page8 sourced figures28 citations
The southern quarter of Tel Aviv-…
Jaffa
A harbour worked for three and a half thousand years, now the southern quarter of Tel Aviv-Yafo: a tell of stacked ruins, an Ottoman old town, and a flea market still going.
10 sites with their own page8 sourced figures17 citations
Jerusalem
The Old City of Jerusalem
Less than a square kilometre behind Ottoman walls, holding the Western Wall, the Haram al-Sharif and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and about 35,000 people who live there.
11 sites with their own page8 sourced figures28 citations
The Jordan Rift Valley
The Dead Sea
The lowest ground on Earth, water nearly ten times saltier than the ocean, and a shoreline retreating by more than a metre a year.
10 sites with their own page8 sourced figures27 citations
Judaean Desert
Masada
A desert plateau some 450 metres above the Dead Sea, carrying Herod's palace, the most complete Roman siege works to survive anywhere, and an unfinished argument about what happened here.
11 sites with their own page8 sourced figures16 citations
Southern Israel
The Negev
More than half of Israel is desert, and almost none of it is sand: erosion craters, canyons with water in them, Nabataean ruins and the darkest sky in the country.
11 sites with their own page8 sourced figures20 citations
Planning a trip: the questions people ask first
How long do you need to see all of these?+
The two ends of this list are about 259 km apart, which is roughly a four-hour drive on Route 6 with no stops. In practice most people build a trip around two or three bases (Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and somewhere in the north or the desert) and take day trips from each. A week covers the headline places comfortably; a fortnight covers them properly.
Do you need to hire a car?+
For the cities, no: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa are connected by fast, frequent trains and intercity buses, and each is walkable once you arrive. For the Negev, the Dead Sea, the Galilee back roads and anything reached down a dirt track, a car changes the trip completely. Note that intercity public transport largely stops from Friday afternoon to Saturday night for Shabbat.
What is the best time of year?+
Spring (March to May) and autumn (October to November) are the two windows where the whole country is comfortable at once: the north is green, the desert is walkable, and the sea is warm enough to swim in. July and August are hot everywhere and punishing in the Jordan Valley and the Negev. December to February is the rainy season in the north and the best hiking weather in the south.
Where do the figures on these pages come from?+
Each destination page carries a table of figures with the year each one belongs to and a link to the body that published it, plus a full source list at the bottom. Across these 10 pages that is 80 sourced figures and 237 citations. Where a number could not be sourced, the sentence was written without it.
How deep does each destination go?+
Past the overview. Every destination has a things-to-do index, and behind it 107 individual sites across the country have a full page of their own: what survives, what was reconstructed, the published opening hours and admission price with the operator linked, how long to give it, and what first-time visitors get wrong. Each destination also has four practical guides covering where to eat, where to stay, how to get there and which month to come.
Are the restaurant and hotel ratings on this site current?+
No, and they say so. Ratings, review counts and opening hours on the eating and sleeping guides come from a snapshot of Google Maps taken on a stated date, printed with that date beside them. They are there so a recommendation can be checked rather than taken on trust. The written recommendation itself never quotes a score, so it stays true between refreshes.