Rosh HaNikra grottoes
Interesting facts
- An Assyrian monolith inscription is thought to record that King Shalmaneser III marched as far as this headland in 841 BC, when it was known as Ba'li-rasi.
- According to legend, the moaning heard in one grotto, the 'Cave of Sighs', is a bride from Acre, thrown into the sea when her horse slipped on the cliff path.
- Waves rolling into the caverns set off double and triple echoes; explorer Yosef Braslavsky once swam in from the sea to trace this 'thunder'.
- 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.
- The Hebrew name adapts the Arabic Ras an-Naqoura, named after the Lebanese town just to the north, and reads its second word as nikra, a grotto or cleft.
- The railway tunnels through the cliff were inaugurated on 24 August 1942, completing a continuous rail link from Egypt through Palestine and Lebanon towards Syria and Turkey.
- In 1944 the line carried Jewish refugees from Germany into Palestine in an exchange for German Templer settlers.
- The steep cable car was built by the Austrian firm Doppelmayr Garaventa, and the Israeli Sign Language sign for Rosh HaNikra imitates its plunging motion.
- Three small islands off the coast south of the cliff are named Tekhelet, Shahaf and Nahliel, Hebrew for azure, gull and wagtail.
- The cliff face is roughly 70 m high, built of pale chalk banded with layers of flint in which hard nodules have formed.
Why it is worth it
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. Waves working along cracks in the soft rock, together with rainwater seeping down from above, carved branching caverns totalling about 200 m, some of them linked to one another. For a long time the only way in was from the sea, so only local swimmers and divers knew them.
The headland has been a boundary and a passage for millennia. The Book of Maccabees mentions the "Ladder of Tyre" in this area as a northern border, and Josephus described the cape as the limit of Acre's territory. In 1941 and 1942, during the Second World War, South African and New Zealand army engineers cut railway tunnels through the cliff to carry a line linking Haifa with Beirut, and with it the rail networks of Egypt, Lebanon and beyond. In 1948 Palmach fighters blew up the bridge between the tunnels to stop arms reaching Lebanese forces, and the line was never restored. In 1949 Israel and Lebanon signed their armistice agreement here. The tunnel towards Lebanon remains sealed.
Tourism began in the 1960s. A 400 m tunnel, dug in 1968 slightly above sea level, joined the grottoes and opened them up to walkers, and in the same year a cable car was completed to carry visitors from the cliff top down to the caves. Its cable is about 102 m long and hangs at a 60-degree angle, and it is promoted as the steepest cable car in the world. Today a visit combines the cable car ride, a self-guided walk through the grottoes, a short film about the site and a look at the old British railway tunnel. The sea and cliff area is protected by several nature reserves, and offshore islets form a marine reserve.
Getting there
The site is about 10 km north of Nahariya, where the coastal railway ends. The nearest airport is Haifa (HFA), about 32 km away.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Hall of the Crusader Knights 19.1 km · fortress
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From the encyclopaedia
Rosh HaNikra or Hanikra is a geologic formation in northwest Israel on the border with Lebanon, located on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, in the Western Galilee. It is a white chalk cliff face which opens up into spectacular grottos.
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