The Most Beautiful Places in Israel
17 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Israel are Dead Sea, Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery and Makhtesh Ramon. The list covers 17 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Few small regions hold as much contrast. A narrow Mediterranean coast gives way within a short drive to the Judaean hills, to the Negev desert, and to the deep trench of the Jordan Rift Valley, where the land falls far below sea level. That geology produced salt lakes, erosion craters and limestone caves, while the land's position between Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean world brought Herodian kings, Roman engineers, Crusaders and Ottoman sultans, and made it sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as to the Bahá'í Faith.
The Dead Sea lies at the lowest point of dry land on Earth, its water so salty that bathers float, with white salt formations along the shore. Above it, Masada is a flat-topped desert mesa where Herod the Great built a palace-fortress, later the scene of the Roman siege that ended the Jewish revolt, and Ein Gedi is a spring-fed oasis of waterfalls and ibex at the foot of the cliffs. In the Negev, Makhtesh Ramon is a vast erosion crater with colourful exposed rock layers, a landform found almost only in this region.
On the coast, Caesarea Maritima preserves Herod's harbour city with its theatre, hippodrome and arched aqueduct running along the dunes, and in the far north the Rosh HaNikra grottoes are sea caves cut by waves into a white chalk cliff. In Haifa, the Bahá'í Terraces descend Mount Carmel in nineteen manicured levels around the golden-domed Shrine of the Báb. In Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre gathers the traditional sites of the Crucifixion and the tomb of Jesus under one roof, inside walls built by Suleiman the Magnificent.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dead Sea | Lake | |
| 2 | Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery | Cemetery | |
| 3 | Makhtesh Ramon | Canyon | |
| 4 | Holyland Model of Jerusalem | Miniature park | |
| 5 | Church of the Holy Sepulchre | Cathedral | |
| 6 | Masada | Fortress | ✓ |
| 7 | Caesarea Maritima | Archaeological site | |
| 8 | Rosh HaNikra grottoes | Cave | |
| 9 | Walls of Jerusalem | City walls | ✓ |
| 10 | Ein Gedi Nature Reserve | Oasis | |
| 11 | Bahá'í Terraces | Historic garden | |
| 12 | St. George's Monastery | Monastery | |
| 13 | Avshalom Cave | Cave | |
| 14 | Ein Avdat | Canyon | |
| 15 | Scythopolis | Archaeological site | |
| 16 | Hall of the Crusader Knights | Fortress | |
| 17 | Solomon's Pillars | Rock formation |
01 Dead Sea
Israel · 38.9 km from Jerusalem31.521° N 35.484° E
Image by mirkosajkov from Pixabay The Dead Sea's basic party trick — you cannot sink in it — comes down to raw density. 24 kg per liter, dense enough that a human body floats almost involuntarily.
Did you know? Its salt is only about 30 percent sodium chloride, compared with roughly 85 percent in ocean water, and it holds the highest bromide concentration of any water on Earth.
02 Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery
Israel · 3.5 km from Jerusalem31.774° N 35.243° E
Image by reijotelaranta from Pixabay The western slope of the Mount of Olives, facing the walls of Jerusalem's Old City across the Kidron Valley, is covered by one of the oldest and most important Jewish burial grounds in the world.
Did you know? Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar, known as the Ohr ha-Chaim, an 18th-century commentator revered across the Jewish world, is buried here.
03 Makhtesh Ramon
Israel30.579° N 34.818° E
Godot13 · CC BY-SA 4.0 From the cliff edge at Mitzpe Ramon the ground simply falls away. Makhtesh Ramon is a closed depression some 40 km long, 2 to 10 km wide and about 500 metres deep, opening below the town in a sweep of bare, many-coloured desert rock.
Did you know? The reintroduced wild asses are hybrids of Turkmen kulan and Persian onager, because the native Syrian wild ass is extinct.
04 Holyland Model of Jerusalem
Israel · 0.7 km from Jerusalem31.773° N 35.202° E
Image by reijotelaranta from Pixabay Laid out on the open ground of the Israel Museum, this is Jerusalem as the historian Flavius Josephus described it: the city of the year 66 CE, four years before the Roman destruction of the Temple, reconstructed in stone at a scale of 1:50 over some 2,000 square metres.
Did you know? It was built in the early 1960s, when the Old City it depicts lay under Jordanian rule in a divided Jerusalem.
05 Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Israel · 2.2 km from Jerusalem31.778° N 35.230° E
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jlascar/ · CC BY 2.0 The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is not one building but a knot of them, grown over seventeen centuries on the spot that Christian tradition identifies as both Golgotha, the hill of the crucifixion, and the rock-cut tomb from which Jesus rose.
Did you know? Through a window behind an 11th-century apse you can see the rock of Calvary with a crack that tradition links to the earthquake at the crucifixion.
06 Masada
Israel · 35 km from Hebron31.316° N 35.354° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by samirsmier from Pixabay Masada is a natural fortress: a flat-topped block of rock in the Judaean Desert whose sides drop about 400 m on the east towards the Dead Sea and some 90 m on the west. The summit plateau is roughly 550 m long and 270 m wide.
Did you know? Geological studies found that the Roman assault ramp is largely a natural spur of bedrock, which the legion's engineers built upon.
07 Caesarea Maritima
Israel · 36.5 km from Haifa32.501° N 34.892° E
Image by samirsmier from Pixabay On a coast with no natural harbour, Herod the Great built one. Between 22 and 15 BC his engineers threw two breakwaters into the open sea, 500 and 275 metres long, and enclosed about 100,000 square metres of water. It was the largest artificial harbour of its time built in open water.
Did you know? The harbour's name, Sebastos, is simply the Greek form of Augustus, the emperor to whom Herod dedicated both city and port.
08 Rosh HaNikra grottoes
Israel · 32.3 km from Haifa33.093° N 35.105° E
Image by AaronsPhotos from Pixabay At Rosh HaNikra, on Israel's northern coast right at the border with Lebanon, a white chalk cliff drops straight into the Mediterranean, and the sea has hollowed out its base into a set of grottoes.
Did you know? Further rows of notches lie below today's grottoes at different depths, evidence that sea level has shifted and each stand of the sea carved its own set of caves.
09 Walls of Jerusalem
Israel · 2 km from Jerusalem31.775° N 35.228° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
איתן פרמן 13:56, 4 December 2006 (UTC) · Public domain The walls that ring the Old City of Jerusalem enclose an area of about one square kilometre that holds sites sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Their line is ancient, but the stones you see today are mostly Ottoman.
Did you know? The old Jaffa Gate has an L-shaped passage, a medieval defensive layout that forced anyone coming through to turn a sharp corner.
10 Ein Gedi Nature Reserve
Israel · 29.6 km from Hebron31.467° N 35.394° E
Radosław Botev · CC BY 3.0 pl Ein Gedi is a burst of green on the bare, cliff-bound western shore of the Dead Sea.
Did you know? The Roman writer Pliny the Elder ranked Ein Gedi second only to Jerusalem for the fertility of its soil and its date palm groves.
11 Bahá'í Terraces
Israel · 1.2 km from Haifa32.814° N 34.987° E
Image by 696188 from Pixabay The Bahá'í Terraces climb the northern slope of Mount Carmel in Haifa as a single straight ribbon of garden, about a kilometre long, from the edge of the old German Colony up to the ridge of the mountain.
Did you know? In 2013 the gardens drew more than 900,000 tourists, alongside some 8,000 Bahá'í pilgrims.
12 St. George's Monastery
Israel · 20.8 km from Ramallah31.843° N 35.415° E
Yousef Odeh Photos · CC BY-SA 4.0 Halfway up the sheer wall of Wadi Qelt, a deep desert gorge in the Judaean Desert, the Monastery of St George of Choziba seems to grow out of the rock: a stack of chapels, cells and terraces clinging to the cliff, with irrigated gardens and olive trees watered by old aqueducts.
Did you know? According to an inscription, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II paid for further restoration in 1234, after Manuel I Komnenos.
13 Avshalom Cave
Israel · 17.5 km from Jerusalem31.756° N 35.023° E
Ricardo Tulio Gandelman from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil · CC BY 2.0 Avshalom Cave, known to scientists as Soreq Cave and to most Israelis simply as the Stalactite Cave, is a single chamber in the Judean hills packed almost wall to wall with dripstone: curtains, straws, stalactites up to four metres long, and pillars where hanging and rising formations have finally met.
Did you know? Visitors descend about 150 steps from the hillside to the entrance, and the walkway inside adds around 140 more.
14 Ein Avdat
Israel30.826° N 34.766° E
טלי אראל · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ein Avdat is a narrow canyon of pale chalk cut deep into the Negev desert, where springs rise from the rock and fall in a chain of waterfalls into still green pools.
Did you know? The gorge itself is only about five kilometres long, yet it holds three separate springs.
15 Scythopolis
Israel · 29.5 km from Nazareth32.505° N 35.504° E
Image by samirsmier from Pixabay At the foot of a great mound in the Jordan Valley lies one of the most complete Roman and Byzantine cityscapes in the Levant: colonnaded streets paved in dark basalt, a theatre, baths and a nymphaeum, all brought down together by an earthquake in 749.
Did you know? An Egyptian stele shows that a large Canaanite temple on the mound was dedicated to a local god named Mekal.
16 Hall of the Crusader Knights
Israel · 14.1 km from Haifa32.924° N 35.069° E
Berthold Werner · Public domain Some eight metres below the streets of old Acre lie the vaulted halls of the crusader headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller, the military religious order of St John.
Did you know? Fragments of a glazed bowl found on site bear olive-green crosses of the order, among the earliest known depictions of its cross in the straight 12th-century style.
17 Solomon's Pillars
Israel · 29.4 km from Aqaba29.769° N 34.955° E
Avinoam Zehavi · CC BY-SA 4.0 Solomon's Pillars are a row of massive columns carved by erosion out of the red sandstone cliffs of the Timna Valley, in the far south of Israel's Arava desert.
Did you know? Steps cut into the rock beside the shrine lead up to a carving that shows Pharaoh Ramesses III together with the goddess Hathor.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Israel?
- On our list, Dead Sea ranks first, followed by Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery and Makhtesh Ramon.
- Why is the Dead Sea so salty?
- The Dead Sea is a terminal lake: the Jordan River flows in, but no water flows out, and intense heat evaporates water and leaves minerals behind. Its salinity is close to ten times that of the ocean, which makes swimmers float easily.
- What is a makhtesh?
- A makhtesh is a steep-walled erosion crater formed when water wears away soft rock beneath a hard top layer, leaving a deep basin drained by a single valley. Makhtesh Ramon in the Negev is the largest, and the Hebrew word is now used by geologists worldwide for this landform.
- How many terraces are there at the Bahá'í Gardens in Haifa?
- There are nineteen terraces stretching up the slope of Mount Carmel, with the Shrine of the Báb at their centre. The gardens are part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site covering Bahá'í holy places in Haifa and Acre.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Israel?
- In our collection, the places in Israel are most often canyons and gorges (2), caves (2), national parks (2) and fortresses (2).
- How many places are on this list in Israel?
- The list covers 17 places.