Western Wall Tunnels

The route begins in the lobby on the northern side of the Western Wall plaza, to the left as a visitor faces the stones, and runs parallel to the wall rather than beneath the platform it holds up. That distinction matters more than any other fact on this page, because the belief that Israeli archaeologists were digging under the Haram al-Sharif is what turned a tourist exit into a week of killing in 1996. Dan Bahat, the archaeologist who oversaw the work, put it flatly to Politico: the tunnel paralleled the compound, it did not run under it.

What a visitor walks along is the base of the retaining wall, at the level the ground stood at when the wall was built, roughly two storeys below the lanes above. The English Wikipedia entry on the tunnel puts the length of wall exposed this way at 300 metres, which is the figure most guidebooks repeat; the same entry gives the wall's total length as 488 metres, and elsewhere quotes 445, so the proportion is best treated as approximate rather than exact.

Beyond the northern end of the wall the route continues into structures that have nothing to do with Herod. There is a rock-cut water channel dated to the Hasmonean period, whose source has never been identified, and it ends at the Struthion Pool, a large rectangular cistern that Josephus already knew by that name in the first century and that Hadrian later vaulted over so a pavement could be laid across it. A modern wall now divides the pool in two. The far half belongs to the Convent of the Sisters of Zion, and visitors cannot pass between them.

Charles Wilson began exposing the wall in 1864 and gave his name to the arch above present ground level, a span the Wikipedia entry gives as 12.8 metres wide, which once carried a bridge from the Upper City to the Temple Mount. Charles Warren, a Royal Engineers officer working for the Palestine Exploration Fund, followed in 1867 to 1870, sinking shafts with gunpowder that are still visible today. Warren's shafts unsettled the city above him. In 1868 the municipal council warned the Ottoman governor, Nazif Pasha, that the work endangered the buildings overhead, and the governor waited until Warren was away on survey before having the entrance sealed with heavy stones.

It stayed sealed for a century. After June 1967 Israel's Ministry of Religious Affairs approved a plan, known at first to only a handful of officials, to reopen Warren's tunnel and extend it along the whole buried length of the wall, partly in order to create Jewish prayer space away from the contested platform above. Rabbi Yehuda Getz, newly appointed rabbi of the Western Wall, led it. Residents above began reporting cracks in their houses, and by 1970 Jordan was protesting that a medieval Islamic school had been damaged; the Israeli government attributed the damage to sewage works.

In the summer of 1981 Getz had a blocked doorway opened that led beneath the platform itself, in the belief that the Ark of the Covenant lay under the Dome of the Rock. Word got out, Arab workers and yeshiva students confronted each other underground, and the door was resealed. It has stayed that way. The tunnel opened to visitors, partly, in 1990, with a single entrance that forced everyone to walk back the way they had come: Bahat remembered nonstop collisions in a corridor lit by bare bulbs.

The fix was a hole a few inches thick. Bahat had prepared a northern exit onto the Via Dolorosa years earlier and left the last of the rock in place, because the decision was political rather than archaeological. Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres both refused it. Netanyahu, three months into his first term and urged on by mayor Ehud Olmert, approved it, and the last rock came out at midnight after Yom Kippur on 23 September 1996. Olmert broke a false wall with a sledgehammer for the cameras the next morning, and the rioting began within the hour.

The set piece of the classic route is a single ashlar in the course the Foundation calls the Great Course, from which the Great Stone Route takes its name. Its exposed face can simply be measured with a tape: about 13.6 metres long and 3.3 metres high. What cannot be measured is its depth, because that runs back into the wall, and for most of the twentieth century that unknown produced a spectacular published weight of 550 to 600 tonnes.

In June 2006 Harry Jol of the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire ran ground-penetrating radar across it and concluded the block is roughly 1.8 to 2.5 metres deep, not the 16.5 metres earlier estimates had assumed. That brings the weight down to something in the region of 250 to 300 tonnes. The Foundation's own site has since moderated its figure to several hundred tons. Either way it was moved and set without powered machinery, and the blocks flanking it in the same course are about 12 and about 8 metres long.

The masonry around it is the reason the walk is worth doing even for someone who has already stood at the plaza. At the plaza only the topmost Herodian courses are visible above the paving. Down here the wall is exposed to something close to its ancient street level, with the drafted margins around each block, the courses stepped slightly back as they rise, and the pilasters that decorated the outer face all legible in a way they simply are not upstairs.

• Exposed face of the Western Stone: about 13.6 m long by 3.3 m high
• Estimated depth on 2006 radar: about 1.8 to 2.5 m, against a pre-2006 estimate of 16.5 m
• Estimated weight: about 250 to 300 tonnes on the radar figure, 550 to 600 tonnes before it
• Neighbouring blocks in the same course: about 12 m and about 8 m long

The wall itself is ancient and unreconstructed: it was cleared, not rebuilt. Almost everything a visitor stands on, walks under or holds on to is not. The walkways, handrails, lighting, air conditioning, signage and drainage were all installed to make an excavation into a visitable route, and the Foundation lists them frankly as engineering problems it had to solve, along with the sewage, before the public could be let in.

In between those two extremes sits a great deal of genuine but much later fabric. The excavation ran through Ayyubid, Mamluk and Umayyad building, including a stretch of the Western Wall repaired in the Umayyad period, and through vaults and cisterns raised over the centuries to carry buildings up to the level of the Temple Mount platform. The Chain of Generations Center, a museum of glass sculpture by Jeremy Langford in the lobby at the start of the route, occupies restored Second Temple period, Crusader and Mamluk rooms.

Dating is still being revised. Johanna Regev, Joe Uziel, Elisabetta Boaretto and colleagues published radiocarbon results in PLOS ONE on 3 June 2020 that put the first bridge at Wilson's Arch between 20 BCE and 20 CE and its widening, to about 14.8 metres, between 30 and 60 CE, which is after Herod rather than under him. A small theatre-like structure beneath the arch was begun between 95 and 135 CE and abandoned unfinished. The study narrowed a spread of roughly seven centuries in the previous literature to two phases of under fifty years each.

The most recent surprise is not architecture at all. On 19 May 2020 the Israel Antiquities Authority announced a system of rooms hewn straight into the bedrock under the Beit Strauss building at the entrance to the tunnels, hidden beneath the white mosaic floor of a Byzantine period structure and reached by rock-cut stairs. The excavation directors, Barak Monnickendam-Givon and Tehila Sadiel, dated it to the Second Temple period from cooking pots, oil lamps, a stone mug and a fragment of a stone basin, and were explicit that what it was for remains a mystery: a pantry, a dwelling, or a place to hide.

Until recently there was one tour. There are now two, they cost the same, and a visitor with one slot has to pick. The Great Stone Route is the classic walk: along the buried length of the wall, past the point closest to the Holy of Holies, to the Western Stone. The Great Bridge Route, inaugurated by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on 28 November 2021 after what the Foundation describes as roughly eight years of development and conservation work, drops a further level under the Old City to the piers of the bridge that carried pilgrims towards the Temple, through rooms and halls of the Second Temple period and past courses of the Western Wall exposed for the first time in about 1,700 years.

The practical difference is stairs. The Foundation states that the Great Stone Route is partly accessible, including as far as the Great Stone itself, and that organised groups can arrange an accessible version limited to five wheelchairs, with narrow wheelchairs available to borrow at the entrance for passages under 48 centimetres wide. The Great Bridge Route it describes bluntly as not wheelchair accessible, with many stairs and unsuitable for pushchairs, though there is a place to leave them.

The point closest to the Holy of Holies is on the older route, and it is a small working synagogue rather than a viewing platform. It sits outside Warren's Gate, an ancient sealed entrance to the Temple Mount about 46 metres into the tunnel that served for centuries as a synagogue known as the Cave. Rabbi Getz built the present one because, if the Holy of Holies stood where tradition places it beneath the Dome of the Rock, this is the nearest a Jew can pray to it. Photography is not the reason people stop here.

• Great Stone Route: the classic walk along the wall to the Western Stone, partly wheelchair accessible, Sunday to Thursday 09:00 to 22:00
• Great Bridge Route: one level deeper, opened November 2021, many stairs, no wheelchair access, Sunday to Thursday 07:00 to 23:00
• Both: guided only, booked ahead, groups of 18 to 35, ₪38 adult and ₪25 concession
• Also in the same lobby: the Chain of Generations Center, ₪30 adult, about 40 minutes, booked and paid in advance