The Ramparts Walk

Both sections are entered at Jaffa Gate, and the operator's English page says so explicitly, because the arrangement catches people out: the promenade looks continuous on a map and is not. The two stairways up sit on either side of the gate, and the ticket booth is inside it.

The southern section is the shorter of the two, about a kilometre by the Hebrew Wikipedia entry's reckoning. It leaves Jaffa Gate above the Armenian Quarter, passes Zion Gate and continues above the Jewish Quarter. The operator's English page gives the end as Zion Gate, with the option of carrying on to near Dung Gate and the Western Wall prayer plaza; its Hebrew route sheet for the same walk simply gives the end point as Dung Gate. Either way it finishes at the busiest corner of the Old City, which makes it the more useful of the two if the rest of the day is going to the Western Wall.

The northern section runs about a kilometre and a half. It leaves Jaffa Gate above the Christian Quarter, crosses the New Gate and Damascus Gate, and carries on above the Muslim Quarter. Here the operator's own pages disagree with each other. The English attraction page ends the walk at the Flower Gate, which is Herod's Gate; the Hebrew route sheet lists the New Gate, Damascus Gate, the Flower Gate and Lions' Gate as its exit points and ends the walk at Lions' Gate. The practical reading is that the northern wall has several ways down and that how far east the path currently runs is worth asking at the booth.

Older guidance, including the Jewish Virtual Library, says the path can be joined at Jaffa, Damascus, Lions' and Zion Gates. The operator's current pages do not: they say the entrance to both promenades is from Jaffa Gate, and sell the ticket there. Group parties can arrange to go up from the outlying gates in advance.

• Southern: Jaffa Gate, above the Armenian and Jewish quarters, to Zion Gate and on towards Dung Gate
• Northern: Jaffa Gate, above the Christian and Muslim quarters, through the New Gate and Damascus Gate
• Not walkable: the eastern wall, along the Temple Mount
• Both sections are entered at Jaffa Gate, and the ticket covers both

Britannica dates the present wall to 1538–40, erected by the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent largely on the foundations of earlier walls: chiefly Crusader, in places Byzantine, Herodian and even Hasmonean. That is the sentence to keep, because almost every other figure attached to this wall is contested.

The measurements are a good example of how thin the published record is. The Jewish Virtual Library gives the circuit as approximately two and a half miles and the height as 20 metres. Wikipedia's article on the Walls of Jerusalem gives 4,018 metres, an average height of 12 metres, a thickness of 2.5 metres and 34 watchtowers, and attributes the design to Mimar Sinan or his office. Wikipedia's article on the Old City gives approximately 4.5 kilometres, a height varying between 5 and 15 metres, a thickness of 3 metres at the base and 35 towers, and dates the building to 1535–42. The wall is one object and the sources describe three slightly different ones. A visitor standing on it will notice the variation directly: the parapet is high in some stretches and low in others, and the path rises and falls with the ground.

The gates were not all cut at once, which is why the walk crosses openings of very different ages. Jaffa Gate was inaugurated in 1538 with the rebuilding and keeps its L-shaped bent entry, a defensive design meant to slow an attacker at the turn. The Ottomans opened a new gate in the northern wall in 1875, the one now called Herod's Gate or the Flower Gate. The New Gate was cut through the north-western wall in 1887, to reach the neighbourhoods then spreading outside. In 1898 a wide breach was made in the wall beside Jaffa Gate so that the German emperor Wilhelm II could ride or drive in rather than pass through the gate itself; the breach is still there, and the southern walk begins beside it.

The Old City and its walls were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1981.

The line the walk follows is original and the surface a visitor treads is not entirely so, and the operator is straightforward about which is which. Its route notes describe four hundred years of Ottoman soldiers using the patrol path between the gates and the guard towers, and then the path being restored and converted into a promenade. The Hebrew Wikipedia entry lists what conversion meant: railings added, paving sections completed and strengthened, lighting installed and signage put up.

Access came in stages and none of them were quick. After the 1948 war the Old City fell to the Jordanian Arab Legion, and the armistice line ran close beside the wall for nineteen years. After the Six-Day War, parts of the patrol path were open to the public but walking them carried a genuine risk of falling, and preparation work started then. The broad conservation project, and the promenade as a designed thing under Nahum Meltzer, belong to the 1980s. The Jerusalem Walls National Park at the foot of the wall was laid out in the same post-1967 period, and is a separate site from the one on top.

One earlier decision shapes the view more than any of this. The British, who took the city from the Ottomans in 1917, made regulations to preserve its appearance: the unbuilt valleys around the walls were to stay unbuilt, as a green belt separating old from new, and building hard against the walls was forbidden. The operator notes that Israeli planning authorities adopted the same approach and that it still holds. It is the reason the wall still reads as a wall from above rather than as a retaining structure for later building.

The promenade has closed before. Writing in Zman Israel on 31 January 2020, Aviva and Shmuel Bar-Am reported that the walk had been shut for years because the stairs and railings were unsafe, and had recently been repaired, reinforced and reopened. That history is worth carrying to the ticket booth: a stretch being closed for works is a normal state for this site, not an anomaly.

The reason to pay for this rather than walk the lanes is sightline. From the wall the Old City stops being a sequence of covered alleys and becomes a plan: roof terraces, water tanks, school yards, laundry, church domes and the gaps between quarters that are invisible from the street. The southern section reaches 777 metres above sea level above the Armenian Quarter near Zion Gate, the high point of the whole promenade, and the panorama there takes in Mount Zion and the Jewish Quarter as well as the modern city outside.

The adult ticket also admits the holder to the Roman Square beneath Damascus Gate, and the two sites share an operator: the East Jerusalem Development Company, known as PAMI, a governmental body the Times of Israel describes as established in 1966. The paper reported the Roman site reopening to the public on 26 February 2025 under the name City Gate, with an eastern arch standing about 4.85 metres and a guard tower about 12 metres high that gives access to the ramparts, and a Latin inscription recording that the colonia Aelia Capitolina built it by decree of the city councillors. Bar-Am's earlier account describes original paving down there and a game board incised into one slab, apparently cut by Roman soldiers about 2,000 years ago, along with remains of Hadrian's central arch which the article gives as 40 metres wide.

The northern route passes the Stork Tower, Burj al-Laqlaq, which stands at the north-eastern corner of the wall, and that corner is roughly where the walkable wall gives out. Beyond it the eastern face runs down past the sealed Golden Gate along the Temple Mount, and no ticket buys a way along it.

This is the part to check on the day, because the operator publishes different hours on different pages of the same site, and the difference is more than an hour. The Hebrew route sheet for the northern section gives Sunday to Thursday and Saturday, 9:00 to 17:00, with 16:00 in winter. The Hebrew route sheet for the southern section gives Sunday to Thursday 9:00 to 16:00, and Friday and festival eves 9:00 to 14:00. The English attraction page publishes only the summer arrangement.

July and August are the exception and are stated precisely. In July the promenade opens Sunday to Wednesday and Saturday 9:00 to 17:00, Thursday 9:00 to 21:00, and Friday 9:00 to 14:00. In August it opens Sunday to Thursday 9:00 to 21:00, Friday 9:00 to 14:00, and Saturday 9:00 to 17:00. Those evening closings are the best hours the site has: low sun on the stone, a breeze on the wall, and the lanes below emptying.

Time it against the two sections rather than the ticket. The operator's route sheets budget about an hour for each section walked on its own; its attraction listing gives one to two hours for a visit. Two hours covers both with stops, provided the closing time is not the earlier of the two published ones. Last admission is not published anywhere the operator states it, which is another reason not to arrive at ten to closing.

The walk is exposed and stepped, and the operator's own advice is short and worth following: comfortable walking shoes, a hat and water. Prams are not admitted and small children are better carried.