Haifa

A settlement has stood at the foot of Mount Carmel since antiquity — Tell Abu Hawam by the bay was a Bronze Age port — and the name Haifa appears in Jewish sources of the Roman and Byzantine periods. The medieval town was small, taken by the Crusaders in 1100 and by the Mamluks later, and reduced to a village by the 18th century. In 1761 the Galilee ruler Daher al-Umar destroyed the old settlement and rebuilt a walled town a little to the south-east, the nucleus of the modern city.

Haifa's rise came with the 19th and 20th centuries. German Templers founded their colony of stone houses in 1868 and laid out the boulevard that still bears the pattern of their settlement. The Bahá'í faith made the city its world centre: the Shrine of the Báb was built on the mountainside from 1909, and the terraced gardens around it were completed in 2001. Steamships, then the Hejaz railway's branch line from 1905, tied the port to the interior, and the British built a deep water harbour in the 1930s and ran the oil pipeline from Iraq to refineries here.

The Jewish quarter of Hadar HaCarmel was planned in the 1920s, and the Technion opened its doors to students in 1924. Haifa was a mixed Arab and Jewish city under the Mandate, with fighting between the communities in the 1930s and in April 1948, when most of the Arab population fled or was driven out. After 1948 the city absorbed large numbers of immigrants, built up the ridge, and grew into the country's main port and its centre of heavy industry, later adding a technology park at its southern entrance.

Haifa presents itself as the city where things work between communities. About a tenth of its residents are Arab, mostly Christian and Muslim, concentrated in Wadi Nisnas, Abbas Street and the German Colony area but present everywhere, and Arabic is heard alongside Hebrew and Russian on ordinary streets. The Holiday of the Holidays, the series of events the city runs each December for the festivals of the three monotheistic religions, is the public expression of that self-image, and murals and sculptures set into the neighbourhood's walls make it a permanent open-air gallery.

The city is also the world centre of the Bahá'í faith, whose administrative buildings stand in an arc above the shrine and whose pilgrims come from every continent. Carmelite monks at Stella Maris, the Druze of the mountain villages, Russian-speaking congregations and a large secular Jewish majority all share the same slope, and Haifa has long had a more mixed, less ideological atmosphere than either Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.

It is a working and studying city more than a fashionable one. The Technion and the University of Haifa give it tens of thousands of students and a strong engineering culture, the port gives it a maritime one, and Maccabi Haifa's football crowds fill the stadium by the bay. Residents are proud that some buses run on Shabbat and that the city argues about industry and the environment as much as about politics.

Nearly 300,000 people live in Haifa, with a metropolitan area of well over half a million taking in Krayot towns around the bay, Nesher and Tirat Carmel. The population has grown slowly; young people have long left for Tel Aviv, and the municipality has worked to hold graduates of the Technion and the university with technology jobs at the MATAM park and new housing on the slopes.

Work is divided between the port, which handles a large share of the country's container traffic, the refinery and chemical industry around the bay, the two universities, hospitals, and the hi-tech offices at the southern entrance to the city. The industrial zone is the subject of a long public argument about air quality and cancer rates, and plans to move parts of the port and the petrochemical plants have been discussed for years.

Daily life is shaped by the mountain. People describe where they live by level — downtown, Hadar, the Carmel — and the difference of a few degrees in temperature between them matters in August. The funicular and the buses carry commuters up and down, students fill Hadar's cheaper flats, and weekends mean the beaches at Hof HaCarmel or the forest trails on the ridge. Since February 2026 the war has brought rocket alerts and shelter drills to the city, and the north has been unsettled by fighting along the Lebanese border.

Haifa's kitchen is the most Arab of Israel's big cities. Wadi Nisnas is known for hummus served warm with whole chickpeas, ful or pine nuts, for falafel fried to order, and for bakeries turning out sesame bread, za'atar-covered manakish and spinach fatayer. Sweet shops cut knafeh — shredded pastry over melting cheese, soaked in syrup — from wide round trays, and grill restaurants serve kebabs and stuffed vegetables with a spread of salads.

The Druze villages on the mountain, Daliyat al-Karmel and Isfiya, add their own specialities, above all the huge thin pita Druzit baked on a domed griddle and spread with labneh, olive oil and za'atar, along with stuffed vine leaves and mountain herbs. Arak, the aniseed spirit, is the usual accompaniment to mezze in Arab and Druze restaurants.

Jewish immigration brought the rest. Romanian grills, Iraqi and Moroccan home cooking, Russian delicatessens in the northern neighbourhoods and eastern European bakeries all have a presence, and the Talpiot market in Hadar sells the ingredients for all of them. Fish comes from the port and the bay, grilled whole or fried and served with tahini. Olives, oil and cheeses come down from the Galilee, and the wineries of Zikhron Ya'akov and the Carmel slopes just south of the city supply the wine lists.