Tiberias is the gateway to the Sea of Galilee and one of the most convenient bases for exploring all of northern Israel. According to the Gospels, much of Jesus's public life took place on the shores of this great freshwater lake. The city blends centuries of Jewish, Roman, Crusader and Ottoman history with the life of a modern resort town: waterfront promenades, beaches, boats across the Kinneret, fish restaurants and hot springs that have been bubbling up for two thousand years.
Herod Antipas founded the city around 20 AD and named it after the emperor Tiberius. Over time it became one of the great centres of Judaism. The Sanhedrin met here, much of the Mishnah was completed here, and the vowel system for written Hebrew was developed here. That is why it is one of the four holy cities of Judaism, along with Jerusalem, Hebron and Safed, and it holds the tombs of famous sages such as Maimonides and Rabbi Akiva.
This guide helps you make the most of Tiberias as a base camp. It covers what to see in the city, how to reach the Christian sites around the lake, where to swim, which hot springs to visit, how to get around without a car on Shabbat and which trips across Galilee and the Golan are worth it. The region carries great religious and political weight. We cover it with facts and respect and without taking sides, so you can enjoy it with context and practical sense.
Tiberias was born around 20 AD, when Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, founded a new city on the shore of the lake and named it after the emperor Tiberius. Because it was partly built over an old cemetery, observant Jews avoided it at first. After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (70 AD) and the failed revolts against Rome, it became the great centre of Judaism in the Land of Israel. It was the seat of the Sanhedrin from the mid-2nd century, the birthplace of the final edition of the Mishnah and the Jerusalem Talmud, and the place where the Masoretes fixed the vowel markings of the Hebrew biblical text. Earthquakes and conquests destroyed and rebuilt it several times, under the Byzantines, the Arab caliphates, the Crusaders, the Mamluks and the Ottomans. From the 16th century it revived as one of the four holy cities of Judaism, with a strong presence of sages and mystics. Today its sacred past and ancient ruins sit alongside the life of a resort town on the Kinneret. You can read the whole story, from Herod to the present, 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.
Tiberias didn't grow slowly over the centuries like so many ancient cities: it was born all at once, by the decision of a single man. Around the year 20 CE, Herod Antipas (son of Herod the Great and tetrarch of Galilee under Roman rule) decided to build a brand-new capital on the shores of the great lake, and named it Tiberias in honour of his patron, the Roman emperor Tiberius. It was a political move: a Greco-Roman-style city, with a palace, stadium, market and baths, designed to win favour with the imperial power.
But the project carried a shadow from the very start. When it was built, Tiberias rose partly on top of an old cemetery, and under Jewish laws of ritual purity, walking over graves made a person impure. That's why many observant Jews at first refused to live there, and Antipas had to populate it with a mix of people, some of them all but forced to move in. Even so, the city prospered thanks to its position by the lake, which was rich in fish, and to the nearby hot springs, already famous in antiquity for their healing properties.
In the Gospels, the lake that laps the city comes up again and again: there Jesus preached, recruited his fishermen disciples and, according to Christian accounts, performed several of his miracles. The name 'Sea of Tiberias' itself is used for the lake in the Gospel of John. Although the texts don't say that Jesus entered the city itself, Tiberias became forever linked to the landscape of those episodes.
The great turning point in the history of Tiberias came after the catastrophes of the 1st and 2nd centuries. The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE, followed by the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-135 CE), left Judaism without its sacred centre and drove the Jews out of the area around Jerusalem. The core of Jewish life then shifted north to Galilee, and Tiberias, despite its 'impure' origins, ended up becoming its spiritual capital.
According to tradition, a renowned sage, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, had ritually 'purified' the city, clearing the way for observant Jews to settle there. From the mid-2nd century, Tiberias was the seat of the Sanhedrin, the supreme court and legislative body of Judaism, whose decisions reached communities throughout the diaspora. The city filled up with rabbinical academies and scholars.
Much of the intellectual work that shaped rabbinic Judaism was done there: the compilation of the Mishnah (the first great collection of Jewish oral law) was completed and, later, that of the Jerusalem Talmud. And it was in Tiberias, between the 7th and 10th centuries, that the Masoretic scholars developed the system of signs used to add vowels and punctuation to the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible: the 'Tiberian system' that standard editions of the biblical text still use today. Few cities in the world have carried so much weight in fixing a sacred text.
The later history of Tiberias is a rollercoaster of splendour and catastrophe. Under Byzantine rule and then under the Arab caliphates (from the 7th century), the city remained important: it was a district capital, trade flourished and the hot springs drew visitors. But the region is seismically active, and a series of devastating earthquakes, including the great earthquake of 749, flattened entire buildings, among them the luxurious Roman baths, and forced the city to be rebuilt again and again.
In the time of the Crusades, Tiberias was a strategic stronghold. Very close by, at the Horns of Hattin, in 1187, Sultan Saladin crushed the crusader army in one of the decisive battles in the history of the Holy Land, paving the way for the Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem. The city changed hands several times between crusaders and Muslims, and paid the price.
After the Mamluk period, Tiberias fell into decline for centuries, until in the 16th century the Ottoman Empire pushed for it to be resettled. In a remarkable initiative, the sultan granted the city to Doña Gracia Nasi and her nephew Don Joseph Nasi, wealthy and powerful Sephardic Jews exiled from Portugal, with the idea of creating a refuge there for Jews persecuted in Europe. The project never fully took off, but it marked the start of the city's Jewish revival. In the 18th century, the Bedouin ruler Daher el-Omar rebuilt Tiberias and its walls, whose remains can still be seen.
From the 16th century onwards, Tiberias re-emerged as one of the great religious centres of Judaism and became part, along with Jerusalem, Hebron and neighbouring Safed (Tzfat), of the group of four 'holy cities'. Each is associated with an element and a spiritual dimension; Tiberias, tied to the water of the lake, became a pilgrimage destination and home to communities of scholars and mystics.
The city's prestige rests largely on the tombs of great sages buried in it or nearby. The most revered is that of Moses Maimonides (the Rambam, 1138-1204), perhaps the most influential Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages: philosopher, physician and codifier of the law, author of the 'Guide for the Perplexed' and of the monumental legal code 'Mishneh Torah'. Although he died in Egypt, tradition holds that his body was moved and buried in Tiberias, and his tomb receives visitors from all over the world.
Also resting nearby are Rabbi Akiva, one of the founding figures of rabbinic Judaism and a martyr of the Bar Kokhba revolt, and Rabbi Meir Baal HaNes ('the miracle worker'), whose shrine next to the hot springs is a place of prayer and pilgrimage. These tombs aren't mere monuments: they are living places of prayer, where people come to ask, to give thanks and to study. In Tiberias, that spiritual intensity sits alongside its spa-town and tourist side, in a mix that is very typical of northern Israel.
21st-century Tiberias is a mid-sized city, lively in high season, that lives off religious tourism, lakeside holidays and its role as the gateway to the whole of Galilee. Christian pilgrims come to sail the Kinneret and visit the Gospel sites along the shore; Jewish pilgrims come to pray at the tombs of the sages; and Israeli families and foreign tourists enjoy the hot springs, the beaches and the fish restaurants facing the water.
The Sea of Galilee (Kinneret) that laps the city isn't just a religious symbol: it is Israel's largest freshwater reservoir and a key part of the country's water supply. Its level, which rises and falls with each winter's rains, is monitored constantly, and the long droughts of recent decades have more than once pushed it to critical figures. Looking after the lake is a national concern.
Tiberias and Galilee also lie in a geographically sensitive region, close to the northern borders: Lebanon and the Golan Heights, the latter captured from Syria in 1967 and annexed by Israel in a move not recognised by much of the international community. The security situation can change depending on the regional context, and travellers should check official sources before and during their trip. Beyond those tensions, Tiberias still offers what it has offered for two thousand years: a place on the shore of a lake steeped in history, where the Jewish, Christian, Roman and Ottoman past overlaps in every layer of the landscape.
