HaYarkon Park

Ganei Yehoshua is a municipal company that also runs Menachem Begin Park in the south of the city and, since 2003, the nature gardens at Abu Kabir. Its account of the park's origins begins with David Ben-Gurion allocating the ground to the municipality at one lira per dunam, on the condition that no houses be built on either side of the Yarkon and that the land stay open as the centre of the city's green space. Planning began in 1969 and the company was set up in 1973.

There is nothing to buy at the edge because there is no edge to buy it at. Drivers use the car parks off Rokach Boulevard: the operator lists one at Rokach 94 and a second at Rokach 80, both open around the clock, plus a Sportek car park. Trains stop at the station the operator still calls University-Fairgrounds, and the bus lines it names are Metropoline 47 and 48 and Dan 22, 89 and 189.

The Yarkon is the spine and the reference point for everything else. The operator measures it at 28 km from the springs at Rosh Ha'ayin to the estuary; the river authority measures the channel at 27.5 km, with a straight-line distance of about 15 km; Britannica gives about 16 miles. The lowest 4 km is an estuary into which the Mediterranean pushes on the tide. Walking the north bank end to end became possible only in November 2011, after the municipality won a long case to clear a shack settlement known as the fishermen's village.

The idea belongs to Meir Dizengoff's administration and dates from 1929. Nothing was done about it until 1950, and the tree-planting ceremony was held on 5 July 1951, near the point where the Ayalon joins the Yarkon. Planting was then handed to a private contractor that worked patch by patch without an overall scheme, and the Hebrew record concedes that by the early 1960s the result compared badly with the national park at Ramat Gan.

In 1962 a committee was appointed to enlarge it, with the architect Aba Elhanani among its members alongside Moshe Akron and Avraham Karavan. It resolved to extend the park to take in the Eretz Israel Museum and Tel Qasile, and to add a lake, a sports hall, a small train and a children's theatre. The scheme adopted was Elhanani's, worked up with the landscape architect Yosef Sagel, and building it fell to Akron, who became the park's first chief executive.

What most visitors walk through is the 1970s redesign, by the landscape architects Tzvi Dekel, Gideon Sarig and Yosef Sagel, who took the Rokach Prize for it. The lake was dug in 1977, Sportek and the rose garden opened in 1978, and Sarig has been the park's architect since the mid-1980s.

The two published accounts of the name do not agree. The operator says the company founded in 1973 was called Ganei Yehoshua after Yehoshua Rabinowitz, mayor from 1969 to 1974 and later finance minister. The Hebrew encyclopaedia entry dates the naming of the park to 1982, three years after Rabinowitz died. Neither addresses the other.

The rock garden covers 40 dunams in the middle of the park and is a geology collection as much as a planting: rock types were brought in from Mount Hermon in the north to Eilat in the south, and hundreds of Israeli plant species were set among them. The operator lists Mediterranean woodland trees including Palestine pistacia and Tabor oak, and geophytes including anemones, cyclamens and sea squills, so what is in flower changes sharply with the month.

The cactus and succulent garden runs to about 26 dunams and holds roughly 50,000 plants of about 3,500 kinds and species, among them euphorbias, cereus, aloes and prickly pears. The operator says some arrived as seed and were germinated in the garden's own nurseries, some came as plants from East Africa and the Kalahari in Namibia, and some were donated out of private Israeli collections.

The tropical garden was laid out in the 1970s over about 20 dunams and is the one to head for in August, because the whole point of it is humidity and shade: frequent irrigation, tall evergreens and shade structures keep the plants alive and, incidentally, keep the visitor cool. Palms, ferns, bamboos, cycads, aroids and water plants grow around pools stocked with fish. The clipped garden, about 15 dunams, is the opposite temperament: geometric beds, fountains and water channels in the classical and early Islamic manner, olive, bay and citrus for the Mediterranean half, and archaeological fragments and mosaics set into the layout.

All four are free, and none keeps the park's hours. The operator's Hebrew pages publish summer and winter timetables; its English pages publish one flat timetable of Sunday to Friday 09:00 to 16:00 and Saturday 10:00 to 16:00. Where they disagree, the Hebrew pages are the fuller and better maintained. Dogs are not admitted to any of the four.

• Rock garden and cactus garden, summer: Sunday to Thursday 09:00 to 18:00, Friday and Saturday 09:00 to 16:00.
• Tropical garden, summer: Sunday to Thursday 09:00 to 17:30, Friday and Saturday 09:00 to 16:00.
• Rock, cactus and tropical gardens, winter: Sunday to Thursday 09:00 to 16:00, Friday and Saturday 09:00 to 15:00.
• Clipped garden, winter: 09:00 to 16:00 every day it opens.
• Last admission to all four is half an hour before the closing time listed.

The Yarkon drains a catchment of 1,800 square kilometres, taking in the Kana, Raba, Shilo and Ayalon streams, and it was the largest of the coastal rivers reaching the Mediterranean. The river authority states that until the middle of the 1950s about 200 million cubic metres of spring water a year came down it, an hourly discharge of some 25,000 cubic metres, clean enough for fishing and swimming. The Yarkon-Negev line then captured the springs, and the authority's own summary is blunt: the river effectively dried out, became a channel for sewage, industrial waste and fertiliser, and its aquatic ecosystem collapsed.

The two figures in circulation for that lost flow are not the same. The river authority gives about 200 million cubic metres a year; the park operator's history page gives about 100 million for the same period. Neither explains the gap, and the order of magnitude is the reliable part.

The Yarkon River Authority was created in 1990, under a founding order of 1988, with a remit of preventing pollution, restoring the stream and fitting it for recreation. It reports roughly 1,800 cubic metres an hour of spring water reaching the channel, about 5 per cent of the historic discharge, plus about 1,500 cubic metres an hour of treated effluent. Species held in refuge collections have been returned, among them the blue water lily and the Yarkon bream. Soft-shelled turtles are monitored, and a handful of jungle cat sightings over thirty years are treated as evidence of a working food web, because the animal is an apex predator.

What forced the pollution onto the national agenda happened on 14 July 1997, at the eastern end of the park. A temporary pedestrian bridge over the Yarkon, on the route into the Ramat Gan stadium for the opening of the Maccabiah Games, gave way under the Australian delegation. One athlete died in the fall; three more died afterwards of infections contracted in the water. An inquiry found the bridge had been built without the required permit, to a design well below the load standard, and five men were later convicted of causing death by negligence.

Seven Mills takes its name from the seven mills in the western part of a much larger milling complex that had worked here since Ottoman times. A dam held the Yarkon back, and the operator puts the annual flow then at 210 million cubic metres; the water ran down a purpose-cut race to turn the stones. More mills went up in the 19th century and the place worked as a rural centre, with a coffee house and a boat mooring for farmers waiting hours or days on their grain. Milling stopped when it could not compete with modern plant, in 1936 on the Hebrew account and in the 1930s on the operator's English one.

How much of it is original is worth stating plainly, because the published accounts do not match. The operator says the site went through extensive restoration between 1990 and 2008, that management passed to the Avshalom Institute, and that excavation led by Yehoshua Drey turned up Ottoman-period material. The Hebrew encyclopaedia entry says it was exposed and partly restored in 2000 and 2001. Either way, what stands is consolidated ruin with modern work in it, not a working mill.

Ten Mills, on the Ramat Gan side between the stadium and the shopping centre, is the biggest of the Yarkon mill sites, with structure standing up to three metres. It was uncovered in 1993 from under vegetation and drift sediment. Milling here goes back to the Roman period, when at least twenty pairs of stones worked; the name settled on ten because ten pairs were running during the fighting of the early 20th century. Its operators built an 80 metre flood wall and a system of dams and channels feeding twelve grinding stations, and the structure doubled as a river crossing, the stone bridge Jisr el-Hadar, which Judith Montefiore recorded passing in 1839. At its height 18 pairs of stones ran here, each grinding 30 to 40 kg of flour an hour, and the dig turned up a collapsed tunnel holding an arms cache of the Zionist underground.

Tel Napoleon, south of the Yarkon and east of the Ayalon, is the third old thing here: a saddle-shaped mound of about forty dunams rising 38 metres above sea level, whose principal find is a shaft of a Canaanite water system. It is not laid out as a visitor site, and the reward for climbing it is the view.

Two venues here take crowds. The Wohl Amphitheatre is the built one, with a cafeteria beside it and a box office that opens two hours before a performance and sells only on the night. The other is not a venue at all in the architectural sense: an open slope called Givat HaMofa'im, the performance hill, where the audience stands on grass.

The attendances on record are the kind normally attached to stadiums. Michael Jackson played two nights in September 1993 to about 100,000 people in total; Madonna followed on 4 October 1993 before about 80,000. In one stretch of July 2017 the park took 57,204 for Britney Spears, 60,000 for Guns N' Roses and 48,011 for Radiohead. Bruno Mars played to 62,000 on 4 October 2023; his second night, booked for the evening of 7 October, was cancelled.

That trade has a cost inside the park. The petting zoo at Bavli closed permanently in May 2023, and the reasons given included concern about keeping animals in poor conditions and the noise of concerts nearby. The rocks from its enclosure were rearranged and left in place for people to sit on.