Ein Avdat National Park

The parks authority's own brochure sets out the sequence, and it is the least obvious thing about the place. Before the Arava rift opened to the east, the upper tributaries of Nahal Zin drained north-west off the Avdat plateau towards Nahal Besor and the Mediterranean. The rift dropped the land east of here by hundreds of metres. Streams flowing east then eroded backwards through the soft basal clays and marls, undercut the hard Eocene limestone above them and brought it down. That collapse opened the broad bed of Nahal Zin and the HaTsinim Cliff, about twenty kilometres of it along the northern edge of the plateau, and swung the upper Besor tributaries eastward into the Zin. Geographers call it watercourse capture.

Where those captured streams met the new Zin, the height difference made rock terraces and high waterfalls, and the waterfalls cut back into deep canyons. How recently is not settled. The parks authority, reading the travertine and the scatter of prehistoric sites, puts the canyon in something like its present form about 45,000 years ago. The Israeli Mosaic account says it may have formed only 80,000 years ago. Both are estimates from indirect evidence, and they do not agree.

The walls read as stripes: pale, soft chalk that weathers back quickly, banded with hard brown and black flint that does not. Where the water it holds actually comes from is genuinely unresolved. The parks authority describes water-bearing clay strata in the canyon walls feeding the springs, and Hebrew Wikipedia calls Ein Avdat a layer spring, rain moving underground until it meets an impermeable bed and runs out sideways. BiblePlaces says flatly that scholars do not know, and that the current theory is flash-flood water seeping down through the streambed gravel. What is not in doubt is that the flow does not stop.

People were here long before the canyon looked like this. On the cliff above Ein Mor is Rosh Ein Mor, one of the best-documented Middle Palaeolithic sites in the central Negev. Rink and colleagues re-excavated it in 1996 for datable material and reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2003 a uranium series burial age on ostrich eggshell of about 200,900 years, with heated flint from the same site giving much later ages of 14,000 to 48,000 years, which they read as later fires rather than as the occupation itself.

• 400 to 600 m above sea level, on the northern edge of the Avdat plateau
• HaTsinim Cliff runs about 20 km along that edge
• Canyon dated to about 45,000 years by the parks authority; another published account says 80,000
• Rosh Ein Mor ostrich eggshell dated to about 200,900 years (Rink and colleagues, 2003)

In the sixth century, when Avdat on the ridge above had become a Christian town, monks from it moved into the canyon. The parks authority describes the caves flatly as hermitages used by monks seeking seclusion. The Israeli Mosaic account, republished by the Jewish Virtual Library, is more specific: archaeologists have investigated four of them, and inside are cut cupboards, shelves, bars for hanging clothes, benches, staircases and water systems. One is a two-room cave with a cross incised above a niche opened as a window.

Two independent accounts record the same name. A Greek inscription in the second cave from the north is a prayer to Saint Theodoros, whose name also attaches to a monastery excavated at Avdat. Uzi Paz, writing for the parks authority in 2024, reports the name Theodoros carved into a cave wall and adds that a kitchen was found in another cave, which is the detail that turns a retreat into a residence.

The monks did not only live here. A square structure stands above Ein Ma'arif near the head of the climbing path, which the brochure and Hebrew Wikipedia both read as a Byzantine lookout from which the monks descended to their caves and to small plots they cultivated by the streambed. A carved rock water channel survives near the poplar grove, and the ground under the poplars may once have been their vegetable garden.

One practical thing before setting out with the caves in mind. The parks authority's Hebrew page carries a standing notice that the access path to the monks' cave has been closed after a safety problem, while the ladder route to the upper lookout stays open. The English page does not mention the closure. The caves can be seen from the trail; reaching the doorway of one is not currently on offer.

Until 1961 the canyon was, in Uzi Paz's phrase for the parks authority, the end of the world and turn left. Apart from Bedouin of the Azazme with their flocks and camels, almost nobody went into it, and even Palmach scouts had not heard of it. The writer Yosef Braslavsky described it in print in 1946, in terms that suggest he could hardly believe he had got there.

In 1960 Yehoshua Cohen, one of the founders of Kibbutz Sde Boker, proposed to the Department for the Improvement of the Landscape, the body that later became the National Parks Authority, that it prepare the canyon for public visits and present it to Ben-Gurion for his seventy-fifth birthday. Until then the department had worked on antiquities sites and on recreation grounds with lawns and pools. It agreed to do something different. The layout was designed by the landscape architects Lipa Yahalom and Dan Zur, partners since 1953, who received the Israel Prize for architecture in 1998. The parks authority's own article gives their prize year as 1988, which the Azrieli Architectural Archive's record contradicts.

The consequences are visible from the first hundred metres. A surfaced road runs to the mouth of the canyon, with a car park, toilets and a picnic ground. The stepped path hewn into the rock beside the waterfall is a made thing: the Israeli Mosaic account says the steps were first cut by Israeli teenagers in 1956 and improved since by the parks authority. And the pool most visitors photograph first is artificial. Paz records that the architects judged an artificial pool would make the canyon more attractive, and built one. It silts up with wash from time to time; when it is clear, the full height of the canyon reflects in it.

The pool under the fall is the natural one, divided by a small dam. Swimming was allowed here once and is not now: the parks authority prohibits entering the water, on conservation and safety grounds, and prohibits eating inside the park.

• 1960: Yehoshua Cohen of Sde Boker proposes opening the canyon
• Designed by Lipa Yahalom and Dan Zur, Israel Prize for architecture 1998
• 1961: road, car park and stepped path open the canyon to any vehicle
• The pool near the entrance was built; the pool under the waterfall was not
• No swimming, no wading and no eating inside the park

The park has two entrances off Route 40, about five kilometres apart. The lower one, near Ben-Gurion's grave and Midreshet Sde Boker, is where the walking starts. The upper one is a viewpoint over the head of the canyon with no way down into it. One ticket admits the holder at both, on the day of purchase.

The parks authority's Hebrew page sets out three routes. The short one runs roughly 800 metres to the spring and back, an hour to an hour and a half. The long one continues to the poplar grove and returns the same way, two hours to two and a half. The long linear route carries on past the poplars, up the ladders and out at the upper car park, about two and a half hours, and it only works if a vehicle has been left at the top or a lift arranged. There is no walking back down: the ladders are marked ascent only, for safety.

The sequence going up is worth knowing before committing to it. From the lower car park the path passes Ein Mor, the big Atlantic pistachio and a stone dam at a trail junction, then crosses the bed to a rock terrace beside the lower pools. Back at the junction, narrow hewn steps bypass the waterfall and come out at its lip. The trail then runs upstream to the poplars, past the cave mouths, and up to the short vertical pitch of steps and ladders. At the top stands the square Byzantine structure, and beyond it the lookout over the cliffs, the upper pools and Ein Ma'arif.

Time is enforced rather than suggested. Entry closes an hour and a half before the posted closing time, and the trails are capped separately: on summer time, last entry to the long trail is 14:30 and to the short trail 15:30, an hour earlier on Fridays, and an hour earlier again on winter time. Visitors are asked to be out by 17:00, or 16:00 on Friday. The reason is not administrative tidiness. Ibex come down to the water once people have gone.

• Short trail: about 800 m to the spring and back, 1 to 1.5 hours
• Long trail: to the poplar grove and back, 2 to 2.5 hours
• Long linear trail: out at the upper car park, about 2.5 hours, ladders are ascent only
• Upper entrance alone: an accessible lookout over Ein Ma'arif, no descent
• One ticket covers both entrances on the day it is bought

The park sells itself as the kingdom of the ibex and the griffon vulture, and for once the slogan is testable. Between 2019 and 2020 Yuval Zukerman, Zehava Sigal and Oded Berger-Tal set trail cameras at two Negev springs nine kilometres apart, Ein Avdat and the far more remote Ein Shaviv, and published the results in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution in 2021. Ein Avdat took a mean of 315 visitors a day in 2019. Under the coronavirus restrictions of 2020, capped at 130 visitors an hour, that fell to a mean of 104.

The animals responded and the control site did not. In 2020 the Ein Avdat ibex came down to drink about eighty minutes earlier in the day, and the ratio of kids to females recorded at the spring more than doubled. Across the data the pattern held: the more visitors on a given day, the later the ibex arrived at the water. Nothing comparable happened at Ein Shaviv. It is the clearest published argument for why the gates here close early, and worth holding in mind when the walk feels rushed.

The birds are the other reason to look up. Griffon and Egyptian vultures nest on the wadi cliffs, and the parks authority gives the nesting season as November to August. A pair of Bonelli's eagles held territory here within living memory; Paz reports that they vanished in recent years and probably moved to Ein Akev, and that most of Israel's Bonelli's eagles were wiped out by poisoning in the 1950s, leaving the species clinging on in the desert away from farmland.

The botany is unexpected for the latitude. The grove above the waterfall is Euphrates poplar, a deep-rooted tropical tree whose main Israeli range is the Jordan valley, and it turns yellow in late autumn and winter. The streambed carries common reed, bulrush, juncus, saltbush and tamarisk. A single large Atlantic pistachio stands in the northern part of the canyon; the parks authority's brochure puts it at about 250 years old and the Israeli Mosaic account at 350. Either way it is a relict of a wetter past, putting out new leaves in summer and shedding them in winter.