Bahai Gardens and the Shrine of the Bab

The gardens' own history page sets out the life the building commemorates. The Bab was born in Shiraz in 1819, announced himself a messenger of God at twenty-four, forbade holy war, taught the equality of women and encouraged science and education, and was declared a heretic by the clergy. He was held in remote fortresses for three years and then executed in Tabriz on 9 July 1850, before what the operator describes as some ten thousand spectators. His remains were dumped outside the city under guard; his followers took them and moved them from hiding place to hiding place.

How long they stayed hidden is stated two ways by the same religious community. The Haifa gardens' history page says fifty years. The international Bahai site says six decades. The arithmetic between the execution and the burial gives fifty-eight years and eight months. What both accounts agree on is the sequence: in 1891 Bahaullah stood by a circle of cypresses on the bare north slope of Mount Carmel and pointed out to his son the spot for a mausoleum; Abdu'l-Baha bought the land and built a plain six-room structure of local stone; and the remains were laid in it on 21 March 1909.

Abdu'l-Baha was himself buried in the same building in November 1921, after a funeral the gardens describe as drawing ten thousand mourners, more than a quarter of the city's population, up the mountain from his house on Haparsim Street. Three further rooms were added in 1929. Britannica's entry on Haifa mentions only the tomb of Abd al-Baha, which is accurate but partial: two of the faith's central figures lie in one building, and the man the gold dome was built for is the other one.

The dome came half a century after the box. William Sutherland Maxwell, a Canadian Beaux-Arts architect and Shoghi Effendi's father-in-law, designed the superstructure in the early 1940s; the first threshold stone was laid in 1949 and the work was finished in October 1953. It is an octagon carrying an eighteen-windowed drum and a dome, with a colonnade of Rose Baveno granite and arches of Chiampo stone. Building materials were scarce in the region after the war, so most of the stone was carved in Italy and shipped, and the dome's structural engineering was done by Professor H. Neumann of the Technion, a few streets down the hill.

Terraces around the shrine had been envisaged from early on and went up piecemeal. In 1987 the architect Fariborz Sahba was chosen to design the rest, construction ran through the 1990s, and the worldwide Bahai community paid for it out of voluntary contributions: the faith's news service put the figure at some US$250 million over the decade, writing in November 2000. Nobody in Israel was asked to contribute, because donations towards the gardens are accepted only from Bahais.

The dimensions are published by the operator and are worth having before the climb. The gardens run 1 kilometre up the northern slope and are 400 metres across at the widest point. The vertical distance between the bottom terrace and the top is 225 metres. There are approximately 1,700 steps from top to bottom, depending on the route. Nine terraces sit above the shrine and nine below it, which leaves the shrine on the tenth counting up from the German Colony.

Sahba counts eighteen rather than nineteen, and the distinction is the point of the design. The eighteen terraces stand for the Bab's first eighteen disciples, whom he named the Letters of the Living; in Arabic as in Hebrew the word for life, hai, has the numerical value eighteen. The nineteenth level belongs to the shrine alone. In the architect's words the terraces are rungs of a ladder leading to it.

The engineering answer to a slope this steep was to hollow into the mountain instead of building out from it, using concave terraces so that retaining structures and walls could be kept to a minimum. Only local stone quarried in the Galilee was used, though some of it was cut in Italy on computerised equipment that did not exist in Israel, which Sahba believed was the first time Israeli stone had been exported to Italy. The stone and metal ornament carries no religious meaning at all: the balustrades simply echo the ornamental windows in the drum below the dome.

• 1 km from the lowest terrace to the highest, 400 m across at the widest point
• 225 m of vertical climb
• About 1,700 steps top to bottom
• Nine terraces above the shrine, nine below, one for the shrine itself

By the standards of a country where the neighbouring sites are Roman and Crusader, this is a young place, and the oldest fabric in it is the part no visitor sees. The 1909 mausoleum is inside the 1953 casing. What stands in the open air is a Beaux-Arts exterior of the early 1950s wrapped around an Ottoman-era room.

The gold is newer still, and it is not gold in the way the postcards imply. The operator says the dome carries some 12,000 glazed ceramic tiles containing a very thin layer of gold leaf. Those tiles are not the originals: a restoration of the interior and exterior ran from 2008 to April 2011, with nearly 12,000 replacement tiles in more than 120 different shapes and sizes made in Portugal, fitted like a puzzle. The same project spent about 80,000 working hours on earthquake resistance, using concrete, steel and carbon fibre, and over 50,000 more on stonework, with volunteers from fifteen countries trained by conservators.

The most recent change is from the year before last. A construction project began in late July 2024, closing the shrine and the gardens around it, and they reopened on Sunday 1 December 2024. The approach paths from east and west were paved in Jerusalem Red Limestone and the plaza immediately in front of the shrine was enlarged and finished in Galil Gold Limestone, the stone already used for the floor of the colonnade and for the terraces above and below. The stated purpose was accessibility, and wheelchairs in particular.

So the honest description of what a visitor photographs is a 1953 exterior, a 2011 dome surface, gardens of the 1990s and a forecourt of 2024, arranged around a room from 1909 that is not open. That is not a criticism of the place. It is the reason the whole composition is in such unusually good condition.

The finish of the hedges is the thing most visitors comment on, and it is bought with staff. The gardens say their team is roughly 90 local workers drawn from a variety of ethnic and religious communities, alongside 50 Bahai volunteers from more than a dozen countries. About 450 plant species grow here, most of them native to the region and chosen for colour, height, hardiness and the ability to survive on very little water.

The irrigation is the part that gets written up in the trade. A computer operates hundreds of valves through a network of polyethylene tubing so that each plant type gets what it needs when it needs it, and the scheduler works from a special weather forecast issued by the Technion to project the evapotranspiration rate. Most water goes to the roots at night through drippers and sprinklers; the occasional overhead watering needed to wash in fertiliser is done in the early morning, when evaporation is lowest. Much of the supply is brackish or polluted water pumped from licensed wells on the property and then treated.

The fountains and the streams beside the stairs look extravagant and are not. Each terrace unit circulates its own closed system, and the operator says the water added across the whole site each day to make up for evaporation is less than one person uses in a day. Large areas of lawn are sown with rye grass in winter and allowed to dry out over the summer, while the sloping ground has to stay planted year round, so ivy and other ground covers do the work of holding it in place.

There is a second Haifa underneath all this. Several Bahai World Centre buildings were dug into the side of the mountain rather than placed on top of it, to avoid disturbing the landscape and the geometry of the gardens. They are mostly offices and car parks, they include the bomb shelters Israeli law requires, and a passageway links them.

The rules make more sense once the category is right. This is a pilgrimage site that admits the public, not a municipal garden that happens to contain a shrine. Nothing may be eaten or drunk inside except water from a bottle you carry, chewing gum and smoking are out, animals are not allowed, and pushchairs are kept off the tour because of the gradient. Photography is fine everywhere except inside the shrines. The gardens are not available for hire and no private events are held in them, although wedding photographs are welcome and common.

The white neoclassical buildings on the arc above the terraces are not part of the visit either. They are the administrative seat of the faith: the Seat of the Universal House of Justice, finished in 1982, the Centre for the Study of the Sacred Texts in 1999 and the Seat of the International Teaching Centre in 2000, with the International Archives building older than all three. A fifth building, an international library, has not been built.

One consequence surprises people who come away impressed. There is no Bahai community in Israel and no converts are accepted, which the gardens explain as following an instruction from Bahaullah to the believers who went into exile with him not to spread his teachings in the Holy Land. The Bahais on the mountain are volunteers serving fixed terms, on average about 650 people from around 75 countries at any one time, roughly a third of them replaced each year.

The gardens are, by a distance, the reason most visitors come to Haifa at all. Reporting in February 2012, the Times of Israel said they had drawn 900,000 visitors in 2011 and more than seven million in the decade since opening. They are also a site in a country that has air raid sirens: the operator publishes a page telling visitors caught in the open to lie on the ground, protect their heads and follow the staff.