Haifa is the big city of northern Israel: a hard-working, tech-driven port perched on the slopes of Mount Carmel and tumbling down to the Mediterranean. It's less touristy than Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, but it has a charm of its own and a well-earned reputation as the most tolerant and mixed city in the country, where Jews and Arabs live side by side as a matter of course. Its panoramic views from the top of the Carmel, with the bay, the port and the gardens below, are among the most beautiful in Israel.
Its undisputed jewel is the Bahá'í Gardens: eighteen perfectly symmetrical landscaped terraces that descend the slope of the Carmel for almost a kilometre, around the Shrine of the Báb and its gleaming golden dome. They are the world spiritual and administrative centre of the Bahá'í Faith, and their beauty, tended down to the last detail, earned them UNESCO World Heritage status. Looking down on them from the upper viewpoint, with the city and the sea behind, is Haifa's signature postcard view, and walking down through them on a guided tour is a calm, one-of-a-kind experience.
But Haifa is much more than that. There's the elegant German Colony at the foot of the gardens, with the stone houses of the old Templer settlers; the lively Arab neighbourhood of Wadi Nisnas and its market; Mount Carmel with the Stella Maris monastery and the cave of the prophet Elijah; the museums and beaches; and a food scene that blends Jewish and Arab traditions. This guide helps you find your way around this city of hills and viewpoints: what to see, how to visit the gardens, how the transport works (including the quirky Carmelit metro), what everything costs and how to use Haifa as a base for discovering the north and the Galilee.
Haifa has ancient roots: there were settlements in the area from Roman and Byzantine times, and in the Bible Mount Carmel is linked to the prophet Elijah. Yet for centuries it was a minor town in the shadow of neighbouring Acre. Its great transformation came in the modern era. In the 19th century, German settlers from the Templer community founded the German Colony, and in the early 20th century the British, during the Mandate, built the large modern port that turned Haifa into the country's industrial and commercial gateway. In 1909 the Bahá'í Faith brought the remains of its prophet the Báb here and built his shrine on the slope of the Carmel, the seed of the future Bahá'í Gardens, today a World Heritage Site and the world centre of that religion. A mixed city of Jews and Arabs, Haifa established itself after 1948 as the great industrial, port and tech hub of the north, home to the Technion, and as a symbol of coexistence. Its full history, from Elijah to the Bahá'ís and from the British port to the present day, is 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.
Haifa's story really begins with a mountain. Mount Carmel, the green ridge that looks out over the Mediterranean and on whose slopes the city spreads, has been a sacred place since the most distant Antiquity. Its slopes hold some of the oldest human-inhabited caves in the region, with remains tens of thousands of years old that are now protected as a World Heritage Site. Even in Antiquity, different peoples revered the mountain as sacred.
The Hebrew Bible ties Carmel to one of its most dramatic episodes. According to the Book of Kings, it was here that the prophet Elijah faced the four hundred and fifty prophets of the god Baal in a challenge before the people, proving the power of his God, and here that he later took refuge in a cave. That tradition made Carmel a place of pilgrimage and spiritual retreat for centuries. Much later, in the Middle Ages, it would give its name to the religious order of the Carmelites and be its birthplace.
Ancient Haifa itself was, for a long time, a small settlement at the foot of the mountain. Roman, Jewish (the Talmud) and Byzantine sources mention it as a modest town of fishermen, dyers and farmers. It lived in the shadow of its neighbour and rival, the powerful port city of Acre across the bay, which was far more important for most of history. Haifa would take centuries to rise.
In the Middle Ages, Haifa followed the ups and downs of the Crusades. The crusaders took it in the early 12th century and made it part of their kingdom. In that period, on the slopes of Carmel, a group of Christian hermits who lived in imitation of the prophet Elijah founded the Carmelite order, one of the great religious orders of the Catholic Church. The order was born on this very mountain and spread from here across the world. Little Haifa changed hands between Christians and Muslims until, like other coastal strongholds, it was razed after the fall of the crusader kingdom.
Under the long rule of the Ottoman Empire, from the 16th century onwards, Haifa remained a minor, half-abandoned town. Its modern revival began in the mid-18th century, when the local ruler Dahir al-Omar, who controlled northern Palestine, moved and refounded the city on a more defensible site, walled it and gave it fresh momentum. Even so, it was still Acre's little sister.
The big leap came in the 19th century. In 1868, a group of German settlers from the Templer Society (the German Templers, a Protestant religious movement that wanted to settle in the Holy Land) founded the German Colony on the outskirts of Haifa. It was a tidy neighbourhood of stone houses with straight streets and gardens, and it brought European methods of building, farming and trade. Those settlers modernised the city, opened roads and laid the foundations of the Haifa that would grow in the following century.
In the early 20th century, Haifa became the world centre of a religion born only a few decades earlier: the Bahá'í Faith. This monotheistic religion emerged in Persia (today's Iran) in the mid-19th century from the teachings of two figures, the Báb and Baháʼu'lláh. It preaches the oneness of God, the oneness of all religions and the oneness of humanity. Persecuted in Persia and in the Ottoman Empire, its leaders ended up exiled to Acre, on the Bay of Haifa.
The Báb, the forerunner of the faith, had been executed in Persia in 1850. In 1909 his remains were moved and buried on the slope of Mount Carmel in Haifa, in a shrine that would become the spiritual heart of the religion. Throughout the 20th century, the Bahá'í community built the spectacular terraced gardens around that Shrine of the Báb, and they are now the city's signature image: eighteen perfectly symmetrical levels running down the mountain. The work culminated in the late 20th century with the shrine's great golden dome and the full set of terraces, which opened in 2001.
Haifa is therefore home to the Bahá'í World Centre, the spiritual and administrative seat of this religion, with its temples, archives and administrative buildings spread across the slope. In 2008, UNESCO declared the Bahá'í holy places in Haifa and nearby Acre a World Heritage Site, the first site of a modern religion to receive that recognition. The gardens, open free of charge to visitors from all over the world, became the city's biggest tourist attraction and a symbol of its spirit of tolerance.
Modern Haifa, the big port and industrial city, is largely the work of the 20th century and the British Mandate. Even under the Ottomans, the city had been linked to the wider world by the arrival of the railway: the Hejaz line, which connected Damascus and Medina, had a branch to Haifa in the early 20th century. But it was Britain, after taking control of Palestine in the First World War, that transformed Haifa completely by building a large, modern deep-water port in the 1920s and 1930s.
That port made Haifa the country's main maritime and industrial gateway. Refineries, factories and shipyards arrived, along with the pipeline that brought oil from Iraq. The city grew at full speed, drawing Jewish and Arab workers, and established itself as a working-class, cosmopolitan port city. In 1912 the foundation stone had been laid for the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, the country's first technical university and today one of the most prestigious in the world, which turned Haifa into a hub of science and engineering.
During the Mandate, Haifa was also a key stage for the growing tension between Arabs and Jews, and for Jewish immigration, both legal and clandestine, arriving through its port from people fleeing Europe and the Holocaust. The British often intercepted those ships and diverted the immigrants to detention camps, a drama the city remembers today at the Clandestine Immigration Museum. In the 1948 war, after heavy fighting, much of Haifa's Arab population left the city, a painful episode that is part of the Palestinian exodus.
21st-century Haifa is Israel's third city and the big urban centre of the north. It is an important commercial and naval port, a leading industrial and tech hub (with the Technion, high-tech parks and offices of major companies) and a university and cultural city. Above all, though, Haifa has earned a particular reputation as the most tolerant and mixed city in the country: a model of coexistence between Jews and Arabs (Christians and Muslims), who share neighbourhoods, schools, the university and daily life more naturally than in other parts of Israel.
You can see that coexistence in mixed neighbourhoods like Wadi Nisnas, in synagogues, churches and mosques standing side by side, and in cultural events like the 'Holiday of Holidays' festival, which every December celebrates the Jewish, Christian and Muslim holidays together. The presence of the Bahá'í World Centre, a religion that preaches the oneness of humanity, adds to that character. It isn't a city without tensions (it has them, like the whole country), but it is a symbol that coexistence is possible even in a region shaped by conflict.
For travellers, Haifa is a pleasant, authentic surprise. It's less touristy than Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, yet it has a world-class attraction in the Bahá'í Gardens, a World Heritage Site. It also has spectacular viewpoints over the bay, charming neighbourhoods like the German Colony, excellent Jewish and Arab food, and a perfect location for exploring Acre, Nazareth, Galilee and the whole north. A city of mountain and sea, of work and tolerance, that sums up a bright and hopeful side of this land.
