Jaffa Port

The port occupies a shallow basin on the north-west side of the Jaffa headland. Approach it down from Old Jaffa or along the seafront from the north and the first thing in view is the basin: fishing boats and small craft on moorings, a low breakwater arm running out and turning, and a green-and-white light at the end of it. Behind the quay stand the three warehouses that give the port its shape, numbered 1, 2 and 3.

Commercial shipping has been gone for sixty years. The Tel Aviv-Yafo municipal tourism service dates the end of all commercial activity to 1965 and describes what has run here since: a base for local fishermen, a yacht marina added some years later, and cruises, fishing excursions and seasonal tuna trips setting out from it.

Down here the ground itself is partly made: the British reclaimed a stretch of sea to lay the port out, and everything a visitor stands on is later than that. The one visible feature older than the Mandate is the line of rocks off the harbour mouth, and those are geology rather than architecture.

Jaffa was a harbour before it had any harbour works, because of a geological accident. The Israeli coast runs in long ridges of kurkar, the wind-cemented sandstone of fossilised dunes, and where a ridge is partly submerged it breaks the surface as a line of rocks a short way offshore. Ehud Galili and Sarah Arenson, in their 2014 survey of Israel's underwater heritage for the journal Riparia, classify that arrangement as a deep-water natural anchorage in 3 to 7 metres of water, list Jaffa among the sites that have one, and note the type was in use as early as the Middle Bronze Age. The rocks off the harbour mouth, the ones the myth attaches to Andromeda, are that ridge, and their job was to take the sea before it reached the boats.

There may also have been an earlier basin that no longer exists. In 2022 Shelley Wachsmann, Aaron Burke, Richard Dunn and Simona Avnaim-Katav published the Ioppa Maritima Project's 2014 geological investigation in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. Their reading of the cores is that from roughly 5,000 to 2,000 years before the present a small estuarine system lay east and north of Tel Yafo and could have served as a harbour: a valley flooded by rising sea level, its mouth partly blocked by coastal sand, then filled by sediment, wetland growth and human activity until only a depression was left, in the area now occupied by Bloomfield Stadium and Groningen Park.

Note the hedging, because the authors keep it. This is a potential early harbour, not a proven one, and no ancient built harbour works on the scale of Caesarea's have been shown at Jaffa. That is worth holding on to when reading the operator's own material: Atarim, the municipal company that runs the coastline, calls Jaffa 'the world's oldest active port' on its pages, and the excavation and coring literature makes no such claim.

• Anchorage type: partly submerged kurkar ridge, 3 to 7 m of water, in use from the Middle Bronze Age (Galili and Arenson, 2014)
• Possible earlier estuarine harbour east and north of the tell, c. 5,000 to 2,000 years before present (Wachsmann and colleagues, 2022)
• That basin is now dry ground around Bloomfield Stadium and Groningen Park
• No built ancient harbour works comparable to Caesarea's have been demonstrated here

The port that exists is a Mandate project. The architect Shmuel Giler, who has worked on the development of the neighbouring Givat Aliya beach and who was researching the history of Jaffa Port at the University of Haifa when xnet interviewed him in 2020, dates the warehouses and the rest of the port to the middle of the 1930s, and gives the reason plainly: the enormous growth in the export of Jaffa oranges. To make room the British reclaimed part of the sea, as they had at other ports short of land, and built the sheds on the made ground.

The scale was new. Each warehouse covers about 2,500 square metres, and nothing of that size had been built in the country before, so the design went to the engineer Frederick Palmer, a partner in the London firm Rendel, Palmer and Tritton, which also handled Haifa Port, reckoned at the time one of the largest engineering projects in the Middle East. The solution chosen was a steel frame, and the frames were riveted: rows of rivet heads along every column and beam, the detail Giler says was lost when the members were replaced.

The commercial timing could hardly have been worse. Arab unrest spreading from Jaffa in April 1936 and the general strike that followed cut Jewish traders off from the harbour, and the municipal tourism service records that a replacement port was built up the coast at Tel Aviv in response. The trade never fully came back. Deep-water cargo went to Haifa and later to Ashdod, and Jaffa's commercial activity stopped altogether in 1965.

The lighthouse above the harbour belongs to the same story and its dates are not agreed. The Lighthouse Directory, Russ Rowlett's reference list at the University of North Carolina, gives the present ten-metre concrete tower as 1936, built when the British rebuilt the port, and dates the station itself to 1862 on the authority of Findlay's 1879 light list, while noting a postcard of an 1875 Jaffa lighthouse built by French engineers for the Ottoman Empire. What is not in dispute is the ending: the light was deactivated in 1966 and its lantern and lens went to the new lighthouse at Ashdod.

• Warehouses and port works: mid-1930s, on ground reclaimed from the sea
• About 2,500 m² per warehouse, on riveted steel frames
• Designed by Frederick Palmer of Rendel, Palmer and Tritton, engineers of Haifa Port
• 1936: unrest and the general strike push traffic to a new port at Tel Aviv
• 1965: commercial activity ends; 1966: the Jaffa light is deactivated and its optic goes to Ashdod

All three warehouses were designated for preservation. Warehouse 1 was dealt with first, renovated by the municipality through its economic development authority with the conservation architect Rami Gil, in a job that kept the structure, the openings, the louvres and the public passages through the building. That work was more than a decade old by the time the rest of the port was touched.

Warehouses 2 and 3 went to Kisselov Kaye Architects, a Jaffa practice, and Atarim began the works in November 2019, describing a project that would upgrade and reinforce the sheds in the southern part of the port while the rest of it kept trading. The permit was for rehabilitation rather than demolition. Its wording, quoted by xnet, allowed dismantling the roof, the external walls and the internal partitions while preserving the building's skeleton, then building new envelope walls and a new roof in line with the conservation guidelines.

That is not what happened. Michael Jacobson reported in xnet in October 2020 that once the cladding and roofs were off and the old frame stood exposed, a tractor pulled the frame down, and that neighbours photographed it. Tamar Tokhler, who runs the Tel Aviv district of the Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites, was asked whether the municipality was misrepresenting the work and answered that Warehouse 3 had clearly been demolished and Warehouse 2 had begun to be. Giler put it at nothing left of Warehouse 3 and Warehouse 2 taken down by eighty per cent, the riveted British steel replaced by plain new beams. The municipality's conservation department, in the person of Dr Yermi Hoffman, said the historic buildings were not being destroyed, that damaged elements were being replaced with identical steel under supervision, and that 'we replaced more than we thought'.

The architects describe something different again, and not dishonestly. Writing in the design magazine Portfolio in June 2022, Tea Kisselov set out the intention as keeping the contour, the mass and the historic construction of the hangars while inserting a stack of containers detached from the outer steel envelope: a new world inside an old world, under an exposed Mandate-era truss canopy. The two accounts are of the same project and not of the same building.

The result opened in June 2023, four years on, at a cost of 150 million shekels. Haaretz, reporting the opening, wrote that the new commercial area replaces warehouses standing in the port since before Israel's founding and that the decision to demolish them had drawn criticism alongside the praise. Atarim, giving the same figure, calls the work renovation and restoration, credits Kisselov Kaye for the buildings and 1:1 Landscape Architecture for the square between them, and lists what went in: Warehouse 2 for culture, with the Barby music club, the Elmina Arab-Hebrew theatre for children and young people, a play centre, shops, restaurants and bars, and Warehouse 3 as a sustainability complex built from recycled containers, programmed by the Latzet Mehakufsa association, which has run the Terminal design complex in Bat Yam since 2009.

• Warehouse 1: conserved earlier by the municipality with the conservation architect Rami Gil
• Warehouses 2 and 3: works from November 2019, architects Kisselov Kaye, square by 1:1 Landscape Architecture
• Permit allowed dismantling roof and walls while keeping the skeleton; the skeletons came down
• Opened June 2023 at ₪150 million, with criticism from conservation bodies and neighbours on record

The fishing is not decoration. Warehouse 2 served as storage for the fishermen before the rebuilding, and Atarim set out the works as being partly for them: more warehouse space, a fishermen's club, lavatories and showers, a goods lift, a sheltered space and a designated area for cooling containers and selling fish, with temporary shaded storage during the four years of building so the harbour could keep working. Boats go out and come back on their own schedule and nobody publishes it.

The least touristic thing in the port is the Na Laga'at centre, whose name translates as 'please touch'. The municipal tourism service describes a theatre company whose ensemble of more than forty blind, deaf and deaf-blind actors and other employees stages productions with English translation shown overhead, with a restaurant and café in the same complex. It works on performance dates rather than opening hours.

The oddest thing in the port is on the sea wall. Eco Wave Power's EWP EDF One installation mounts ten floats along the breakwater; they rise and fall with the swell and drive a land-based conversion unit that turns the movement into fluid pressure and then electricity. Installed capacity is 100 kilowatts, which the Times of Israel puts at roughly a hundred households, and it is Israel's first wave energy project connected to the grid. The partners are the company, EDF Renewables Israel, the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality and Atarim. Grid cables were laid in January 2020 and the first float went up in February 2022, but the formal opening slipped more than a year because of the war and took place on 5 December 2024, with President Isaac Herzog and the mayor Ron Huldai at the ribbon. In its own report for March 2026 the company said the system ran continuously through the month and produced more than 1,200 kilowatt hours.

The floats belong to a wider municipal idea for the port as a testing ground for marine technology, which Atarim writes up under the heading of the blue economy: an ecological concrete meant to let marine life colonise harbour structures, a plant-derived antifouling paint first trialled on boats here, and a berth-booking platform for marinas. None of it is signposted, so a visitor who does not know to look at the sea wall will walk past all of it.