Haifa is Israel’s chief port and home to 400,000 residents. Draped around the slopes of Mount Carmel, this spectacular 100-year-old city’s importance burgeoned in the 1920s and 1930s as Britain followed its League of Nations mandate over Palestine to create a Jewish homeland.
The bustling lower neighbourhood of Carmel is considered the port area, where Haifa’s daily business is overseen. The slopes of central Carmel are residential, and the mountaintop home to museums, many hotels and shops.
Visit the golden-domed Baha’i Shrine of the Bab, completed in 1953, abutting the international headquarters of the Baha’i Faith, a network of white Greco-Roman buildings whose beauty is stunning. The Shrine of the Bab beautified with the completion in 2001 of the hanging gardens now registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, you will discover terraced gardens leading from the shrine to the bottom of Mount Carmel spectacular.
Home to a dozen museums – including the Museum of Japanese Art, Israel’s Railway Museum and the Af-Al-Pi-Chen Museum of Illegal Immigration, you will also find the Technion, Israel’s version of MIT.