Kalia Beach

The site works on two levels. The gate, the car park, the shops and the terrace restaurant sit on the upper level; the bathing strip, the lower bar and the lifeguard's hut are below, and a minibus runs between a stop by the entrance and a stop beside the hut. There is no timetable. The operator's instruction is to press the bell at the stop and wait.

The kibbutz sells two quite different tickets and the difference is easy to miss. The all-inclusive ticket is ₪45 for anyone aged 13 and over and ₪35 for a child aged 3 to 12, a senior, a student, a disabled visitor or a soldier in regular service, and it covers parking, beach chairs, an umbrella and unlimited shuttle rides. The second route is entry only, at ₪20 for anyone over 13, which buys the toilets and the showers and nothing else.

Taken on its own, ₪20 looks like the cheap option. It is not, for anyone who arrives by car. Parking is charged separately at ₪0.70 a minute for the first thirty minutes and ₪0.50 a minute after that, to a daily maximum of ₪90, with the first fifteen minutes free on the English page. A deckchair is ₪8, an umbrella ₪8 and the shuttle ₪10 per person each way. A driver who wants a chair and a lift down to the water passes ₪45 quickly.

Tickets are sold at the gate and nowhere else. The kibbutz states plainly that there is no way to book a day visit in advance and no need to, because the beach is wide. Opening hours are the same every day of the week including Saturdays and festivals: 08:00 to 18:00 in summer and 08:00 to 17:00 in winter.

• All-inclusive: ₪45 adult, ₪35 child aged 3 to 12, senior, student, disabled visitor or serving soldier
• Entry only: ₪20 for over-13s, covering toilets and showers
• Parking: ₪0.70 a minute for 30 minutes, ₪0.50 a minute after, ₪90 a day maximum
• Shuttle ₪10 one way, deckchair ₪8, umbrella ₪8
• Towel hire ₪16, or ₪31 to buy one

Moshe Novomeysky, born in Barguzin in Siberia in 1873, first saw the Dead Sea in 1911 and spent the next sixteen years trying to obtain the right to work it. High Commissioner Herbert Plumer accepted his application in 1927 and a seventy-five year concession followed in August 1929. Palestine Potash Limited was incorporated in England that same year, registered as a foreign company in Palestine in 1930, and on 1 January 1930 was formally granted the concession for the extraction of salts and minerals in the Dead Sea.

The company worked from two sites: the northern plant here, and a second at Sodom at the far southern end. Potash was made by solar evaporation of the brine, the workforce was both Arab and Jewish, and a settlement for the workers named Kalia grew up beside the plant from 1934. From 1936 the business was profitable, which it managed against a German potash cartel selling below cost to break it.

It ended in a fortnight. Novomeysky negotiated a neutral-zone agreement with Transjordan on 13 May 1948 and was then injured in an accident that stopped him following it up. On 19 and 20 May, on Ben-Gurion's order, hundreds of workers, kibbutz members and the Palmach detachment left, going out by boat. The Arab Legion entered on 22 May and destroyed the potash installations and both kibbutzim. The northern shore stayed empty apart from a Jordanian army camp.

The company itself survived the loss of its northern half: it was nationalised by the Israeli government in 1951 and renamed the Dead Sea Works in 1953. The industry never came back to this end of the lake. What came back was farming, and later a beach.

There is no archaeology to look at here. Everything a visitor walks past is post-1967 and most of it is far newer than that. Kalya was re-established as a Nahal paramilitary settlement in 1968, the first in the area; civilians moved into the former Jordanian camp in 1972 and the finished houses were occupied in 1974. The kibbutz dates its own founding to 1974 and to a Nahal group, so its account and the encyclopaedic one differ by six years depending on whether the outpost or the houses is treated as the start.

The kibbutz says it has around 450 members, farms some of the largest date plantations in the country, runs a dairy and a chicken house, and generates its own electricity from the sun. Alongside the beach it operates a holiday village of about 64 rooms, the -420 glamping site and the Qumran site up the road. The published population figures differ from the membership figure the kibbutz gives: 585 people in 2024, on the encyclopaedic count.

The one thing on the shore that is genuinely old is derelict. Buildings left behind as the water withdrew now carry the -430 Gallery, a street-art project the kibbutz launched in March 2018 and has since filled with work by 36 artists, on three set themes: the drying of the sea, the geography and wildlife of the basin, and the relationship between the people who live around it, in Jericho and in the Dead Sea settlements. The kibbutz says the project runs on donations, takes no government money, and is open to the public around the clock.

The eating arrangements are the part that catches people out. The terrace restaurant is an events venue for up to 150 people and is not open continuously; the Salty pop-up at the entrance opens at weekends; the lower bar, which the kibbutz and reference sources alike call the lowest bar in the world at 417 metres below sea level, opens Thursday to Saturday and on festivals and is shut from Sunday to Wednesday. On a Monday, the juice bar is the whole menu.

The Dead Sea's surface is the lowest natural land or water surface on Earth, and it is still going down. Israel's State Comptroller reported in 2025 that the northern basin, the one this beach stands on, is expected to keep falling by about 115 centimetres a year. The strait that once joined it to the southern basin is dry. A beach on this shore is therefore a moving target, and the walk from the terrace to the water is longer than the plans of any given decade assumed, which is what the shuttle is for.

The retreat also leaves buried salt behind, fresh groundwater dissolves it, and the ground drops without warning. The Geological Survey of Israel counted a little over a hundred sinkholes in 1990; by the time the Times of Israel reported on them there were more than 6,000, with new ones appearing daily. The casualties on this coast are a matter of record: Mineral Beach and the public beach at Ein Gedi have gone, along with the jobs they held, and Einot Tzukim closed its bathing access in 2000.

That is the honest reason Kalia is busy. It is not that the northern shore has been improved. It is that almost everything else on it has been shut, and a lifeguarded beach with a checked car park is now a scarce thing here. The same 2025 comptroller report found that eleven of twelve projects meant to shore up the northern basin were incomplete, and named the Megilot Dead Sea Regional Council among the bodies whose tourism development had not been carried through.

For a visitor the practical consequence is short and inflexible: bathe where the lifeguard is, use the marked paths and the marked parking, and do not wander along the shore to find a quieter spot. Unfenced ground away from the managed strip is exactly the ground that has been collapsing.

The turning is on Route 90 just south of the Lido junction. Coming from the north, the kibbutz directs drivers to turn left immediately after the junction and left again at the first turning; coming from the south, to pass Kibbutz Kalia, take the first proper right and then the next left. The operator advertises the drive from Jerusalem as 25 minutes, which is a fair-weather figure for a road that drops about a kilometre in altitude on the way down.

Without a car it is harder than the distance suggests. The kibbutz says Egged buses serve the site, but they stop on Route 90 itself, leaving a walk of roughly 1.5 kilometres and ten to fifteen minutes from the bus stop to the beach gate. There is no shade on that stretch, and this is a desert shore: the national high on 17 July 2019, 49.9°C, was recorded at the southern end of this same lake.

The beach lies within the Megilot Regional Council, which was established in 1981, is the smallest regional council in Israel and takes its name from the scrolls found at Qumran inside its territory. Its six communities are Israeli settlements in the Judea and Samaria area, that is, in the West Bank rather than in Israel proper. Israel and most other states take opposite views on the legality of civilian settlement there, and this page does not attempt to settle that. Practically, the drive is on an Israeli-run road to an Israeli-run gate, and visitors should check what their own travel insurance says about the territory before relying on it.