Acre (Akko) is one of Israel's most fascinating cities: a walled old town overlooking the Mediterranean, where millennia of history have been layered on top of each other. What makes it truly unique is that, beneath the streets and buildings of the Ottoman city you walk through today, an almost intact 13th-century Crusader city survives: the huge halls of the Knights Hospitaller, Gothic refectories, crypts and even a secret Templar tunnel that leads out to the sea. Walking through Acre means moving through two cities at once, one on top of the other, on a unique journey to the heart of the Crusades.
But Acre isn't a museum: it's a living, predominantly Arab city, with a bustling souk, a fishing harbour full of boats, Ottoman walls where the sea breaks, and some of the best food in the country. Here you eat ultra-fresh fish, first-rate hummus and a feast of Arab sweets in legendary spots. Its old town, with the great El-Jazzar Mosque crowning the skyline, was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its exceptional historical value, and it's one of the best-preserved examples of a walled Ottoman city in the eastern Mediterranean.
Its history is among the most intense in the region: it was the Crusaders' great port and the last capital of their Kingdom of Jerusalem, it fell in 1291, bringing the Crusades to an end, it withstood Napoleon's siege in 1799, and it was the place of exile and death of the prophet of the Bahá'í faith. This guide helps you explore it with purpose: what to see in the underground Crusader city and the Ottoman one, how to get there from Haifa, how much the combined ticket costs, where to eat the best fish and hummus, and how to combine Acre with the rest of the north. An absolute must-see in Israel.
Acre is one of the oldest port cities in the world, inhabited for thousands of years and mentioned in Egyptian, Assyrian and biblical sources. In the Hellenistic period it was called Ptolemais and was an important port. Its golden age came with the Crusades: taken by the Crusaders in 1104, it became the main port of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem and, after Jerusalem fell to Saladin, its de facto capital and the base of the military orders (Hospitallers, Templars, Teutonic Knights). In 1291, the fall of Acre to the Mamluks ended almost two centuries of Crusader presence in the Holy Land. It was reborn under the Ottomans in the 18th century, when the rulers Dahir al-Omar and Ahmed al-Jazzar walled and embellished it; in 1799, El-Jazzar, with British help, successfully withstood the siege of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was also the place of exile and death of Baháʼu'lláh, founder of the Bahá'í faith. Its old town, with the Crusader city preserved beneath the Ottoman one, is a World Heritage Site. All that history, from Ptolemais to today, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The green hills of Galilee and its great lake, cradle of early Christianity and a Jewish refuge after the fall of the Temple, with the Crusader port of Acre and multicultural Haifa.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Acre is one of the oldest port cities in the world, with a history stretching back more than four thousand years. Its setting, on a tongue of land that forms a natural harbour at the northern end of Haifa Bay, made it a prize from the earliest times. It already appears in Egyptian documents from the second millennium BCE, in Assyrian texts and in the Hebrew Bible, and it was an important stronghold of the Canaanites and Phoenicians, seafaring peoples who ruled this coast.
With the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, Acre entered the orbit of the Greek world. Under the Hellenistic rulers who divided up Alexander's empire, the city was renamed Ptolemais in honour of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, and under that name it was a thriving Greek and later Roman port for centuries. According to the Acts of the Apostles, the apostle Paul stopped here on one of his journeys, when the city was called Ptolemais.
Under Roman and then Byzantine rule, Acre remained an active port, though it stood in the shadow of other great cities in the region such as Caesarea and Tyre. After the expansion of Islam in the 7th century, the city came under Muslim Arab rule and carried on as a trading hub and naval base. But its great moment, the chapter that would make it famous across Europe, was still to come, and the Crusaders would bring it.
The Crusader period was the most glorious and decisive in Acre's history. After the First Crusade, Christian knights took the city in 1104 and turned it into the main port of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, the gateway for pilgrims, goods and reinforcements from Europe. They knew it as Saint-Jean d'Acre (St John of Acre), after the order of the Knights of St John (the Hospitallers) that settled there. The city filled up with Italian merchants (Venetians, Genoese, Pisans), churches, palaces and the fortresses of the great military orders.
When Sultan Saladin retook Jerusalem for Islam in 1187, Acre became even more important. Recaptured by the Crusaders in 1191 during the Third Crusade, with Richard the Lionheart taking part, it became the de facto capital of the Crusader kingdom, its political, economic and military centre for almost a century. It was a rich, cosmopolitan city, home to the Hospitallers, the Templars and the Teutonic Knights, each with its own fortified complex. It is this 13th-century Acre that survives today, almost miraculously, beneath the Ottoman city: the great halls of the Hospitallers, the refectories, the crypts and the Templars' Tunnel.
The end came dramatically. In 1291, after almost every other Christian stronghold had fallen, the Mamluk armies of Egypt laid siege to Acre. After weeks of fierce fighting, the city fell and was razed. Its fall marked the end of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and, with it, the end of nearly two centuries of Crusader presence in the Holy Land. Acre lay in ruins and, for centuries, was practically uninhabited, its remains buried under rubble.
Acre was reborn in the 18th century, by then under the Ottoman Empire, thanks to two strong rulers. First, Dahir al-Omar, an Arab sheikh who controlled much of northern Palestine in the mid-century, made Acre his capital, rebuilt it, walled it and revived its trade, above all in cotton exported to Europe. After him, power passed to a fearsome figure: Ahmed Pasha al-Jazzar ('the Butcher'), an Ottoman governor of Bosnian origin, cruel and effective, who ruled Acre with an iron fist in the late 18th century.
El-Jazzar gave Acre much of its present look: he strengthened the walls and built the great mosque that bears his name, the Turkish hammam, caravanserais such as Khan al-Umdan and a whole ensemble of Ottoman buildings, in many cases raised right on top of the buried Crusader city, which was preserved as a result. The Ottoman Acre you walk through today is, to a large extent, his work.
The episode that made this Ottoman Acre world-famous was Napoleon Bonaparte's siege in 1799. In the middle of his Eastern campaign, after conquering Egypt, Napoleon marched up the coast and besieged Acre, defended by El-Jazzar with the help of Admiral Sidney Smith's British fleet. For two months the French army threw itself against the city walls without managing to take them. It was one of Napoleon's first major defeats, and he had to withdraw and give up his dream of conquering the East. It is said that Acre put an end to his ambition of emulating Alexander the Great. The walls that stopped him are the same ones you stroll along by the sea today.
In the 19th century, Acre added another layer to its religious history. The city and its Ottoman prison compound were the place of exile of Baháʼu'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith, a monotheistic religion born in Persia that teaches the unity of humankind. Banished by the Ottoman authorities, Baháʼu'lláh spent the last years of his life in the Acre area and died in 1892 at the Mansion of Bahji, on the outskirts of the city, where his tomb stands, the holiest place in the Bahá'í Faith. That is why Acre, together with neighbouring Haifa, is home to Bahá'í holy places that are now a World Heritage Site.
During the First World War, Acre passed from Ottoman to British rule. Under the British Mandate for Palestine, the city's old fortress and prison, the citadel, was used as a high-security jail, where members of the Jewish underground movements fighting to end the Mandate were imprisoned and executed; a famous prison break in 1947 became etched in the memory of those turbulent years.
In the 1948 war that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel, Acre was taken by Israeli forces, and much of its Arab population left or was displaced from the city, although, unlike in other towns, a sizeable Arab community remained, and their descendants are still the majority in the old city today. That Arab character has endured as a distinctive feature of the city within Israel.
Today's Acre is a mid-sized city in northern Israel with a mixed population but a clear Arab majority in its old city, and it blends the weight of history with everyday life in a unique way. In 2001 the Old City of Acre was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, in recognition of its exceptional ensemble: a fortified Ottoman town built on top of the remarkably well-preserved remains of the 13th-century Crusader capital. It is a one-of-a-kind case: two historic cities stacked on top of each other, one visible and the other underground.
Over the past few decades, an ambitious programme of excavation and restoration has gradually brought Crusader Acre to light (the Hospitaller halls, the Templars' Tunnel) and prepared it for visitors, while the great Ottoman monuments, such as the El-Jazzar Mosque, the hammam and the caravanserais, have been preserved. All of this sits alongside a fully lived-in old city, with its souk, its fishing harbour, its mosques and churches and its famous Arab cuisine.
For travellers, Acre offers one of the most complete and authentic experiences in Israel: the thrill of exploring an almost intact Crusader city, the beauty of the Ottoman sea walls that stopped Napoleon, the bustle and flavours of a living Arab souk, and the calm of the Bahá'í holy places on the outskirts. Thousands of years of history (Phoenician, Greek, Crusader, Ottoman) and a city that is still very much alive, all within the same walls facing the Mediterranean. A must-see destination in the north of the country.
