Haifa & Carmel

Where Mount Carmel, one of the great ridges of the Levant, reaches the Mediterranean and stops, Haifa rises in three tiers: the port and lower city at sea level, Hadar on the mid-slopes, and the Carmel neighborhoods on top, with the whole bay below. Locals say that in Jerusalem they pray, in Tel Aviv they play, and in Haifa they work. Israel’s third-largest city is a port, an industrial city and a university city, home to the Technion, and one of the most genuinely mixed communities in the Middle East — Jews and Arabs side by side in Wadi Nisnas, Druze villages on the ridge, and the Baha’i World Centre with its gardens descending the mountain.

The mountain is Elijah’s. Tradition places his contest with the 450 prophets of Baal at Muhraka, and his cave at the foot of the Carmel is venerated by Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze. Crusader hermits who came to follow his example founded the Carmelite order here, and its world headquarters still stands at Stella Maris. German Templars built the German Colony in 1868, Kaiser Wilhelm II landed here in 1898, and in the caves of Nahal Me’arot Neanderthals and early modern humans lived side by side some 100,000 years ago. At Atlit, just to the south, the British held Jewish refugees, many of them Holocaust survivors, within sight of the land they had come to reach.