Caesarea Harbour Visitors' Centre

The building is not a visitor centre that happens to be old. It is the load-bearing base of the temple platform, and the exhibition has been fitted into it without changing the plan. The Caesarea Development Corporation describes the Herodian array as two wings, north and south, of four large vaults each, with six smaller vaults between them carrying the monumental staircase that climbed from the quay to the temple. Four plus four plus six is the fourteen the parks authority counts.

The four now open are the southern wing. They face west onto the harbour, which is why the parks authority calls each restored vault a kind of window on the Mediterranean, and they are reached from either park entrance, though the corporation's own directions recommend coming in from the north, through the Crusader gate. There are signs from the harbour front.

One consequence of building a museum inside a conserved ancient structure is worth knowing before arriving. There are no lavatories in it: the corporation says plainly that the restored building is not equipped with them and points visitors to the public ones at the park entrance. Food and drink are not allowed inside either, and the only dogs admitted are service dogs, although dogs on a lead and muzzled are allowed elsewhere in the park.

• Four large vaults, each about 21 m long and 5 m wide, standing 7.4 m to the crown
• Part of an array of fourteen: two wings of four, plus six small vaults under the stairs
• Northern (Crusader gate) entrance is the shorter walk
• No lavatories, no food or drink, no pets except service dogs

The honest answer is that the visitor is standing in a building that has already been repaired once, in antiquity, and then again in this century. The corporation's account of the works is unusually frank about the state of the vaults beforehand: by the excavations of the 1960s and 1990s conservators were already worried, the collapsed sections showed a process of deterioration running back to ancient times, and only one vault, Vault 1, had survived intact. That one was itself close to collapse and had to be propped and stabilised as a holding measure until the main project could begin.

The excavation then turned up something the project had not expected. The vault system had collapsed once before and been rebuilt in the Byzantine period, by restorers who kept the original design rather than replacing it, adding supporting arches to hold the structure up. The same instinct, several centuries later, produced the Crusader arches that shore up the cathedral in the same town.

The modern work went further than propping. The corporation lists excavation, dismantling and reassembly, structural stabilisation, the completion of weight-bearing walls, the reopening and restoration of arched passageways between the vaults, the strengthening of large ancient stones, and the addition of multi-layered wooden arches along the whole western façade. That last item is the one to look for: the timber arcade facing the sea is a modern insertion, and it is not pretending otherwise.

• Vault 1 was the only one of the array still standing whole, and it was near collapse
• The array fell once in antiquity and was rebuilt in the Byzantine period with added supporting arches
• Modern work: dismantling and reassembly, stabilisation, reopened arched passages, strengthened stones
• The western façade carries new multi-layered wooden arches

The parks authority sets out what is in each space. One vault holds the film about Herod, projected in vertical format so that the image runs the full height of the arch, which the authority describes as about eight metres of screen. The corporation places it in the second vault and recommends it for children of eight and over, on the grounds that its Herod is a deliberately unsoftened one.

A second vault carries a computer animation of the port of Caesarea from antiquity to the present. A third holds a dynamic map of the ancient shipping lanes, which exists to make a specific point: the trade running out of this harbour did not simply go to Rome, but to Marseille, to Carthage and to other destinations round the Mediterranean basin. The fourth space carries the archaeological material, described by both operators as finds from excavations on land and in the sea. Neither publishes an object list, so what is in the cases on a given day is not something this page can promise.

The visit is self-guided throughout. The corporation states that there are no tours and no audio guides on site, and the parks authority says the same about guided tours. The exhibition runs in Hebrew, English and Arabic; the Herod film is in Hebrew and English, with subtitles in other languages available on request at the reception desk. Photography is allowed and the operator actively encourages it.

The vaults make more sense once it is clear what was on top of them. Josephus, describing Herod's city, says that on an elevation facing the mouth of the harbour stood a temple, conspicuous from a long way out to sea, holding a colossal statue of Caesar and another of Rome. The vault array was the engineering that raised that platform out of a working quayside, with the storage rooms of a commercial port underneath and a ceremonial staircase running up through the middle of them.

The platform outlived the temple. In the sixth century an octagonal martyrion, the main Byzantine church of the city, was built directly on the podium that had carried Herod's temple, which was a common enough Christian practice with a pagan sanctuary. Later periods used the same raised ground again. So the four vaults now holding a screen and a display case carried, in succession, an imperial cult temple and then a church.

That is also why the centre is where it is rather than in a purpose-built shed by the car park. The Caesarea Development Corporation states that displaying the vaults standing on the pier of Herod's port, in front of the monumental wall of the temple podium, was one of the declared goals of the whole 2015 to 2019 project.

This is the practical thing most first visits get wrong. Caesarea harbour can be entered on a reduced ticket: the corporation publishes an ₪18 admission to the port, and a ₪14 ticket for people coming only to eat at one of the harbour restaurants. Both of those exclude the visitors' centre, along with the theatre and the hippodrome. The centre is covered by the full national park ticket, which the parks authority prices at ₪46 for an adult and ₪27 for a child, with ₪39 for a student or an adult in a group and ₪23 for an Israeli senior citizen or a child in a group.

If the cheap ticket has already been bought, the situation is recoverable. The parks authority says the entrance ticket can be topped up at the reception desk inside the visitors' centre itself, so nobody has to walk back to the gate.

One warning about published prices. The corporation's own price list and the parks authority agree on ₪46 and ₪27, but the corporation's visitors' centre FAQ still quotes an older ₪39, ₪24 and ₪20, and the parks authority's article about the centre, last updated in December 2021, quotes ₪39 and ₪24 as well. The park's own price table is the figure to trust, and it is the one reproduced here.

Booking is only required in bulk. Both operators ask groups of more than ten to book ahead, and the corporation's Hebrew page states that admission is limited to 45 visitors every fifteen minutes and recommends reserving a slot. Individuals without a booking are admitted on a first-come basis.

• ₪18 port ticket: harbour front only, centre not included
• ₪14 ticket for restaurant diners: centre not included
• ₪46 adult full park ticket: centre included
• Tickets can be upgraded at the centre's own reception desk