Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is young even by the standards of new cities. In 1909 some sixty Jewish families from crowded Jaffa drew lots for plots of sand north of the town and founded a garden suburb called Ahuzat Bayit, renamed Tel Aviv the following year after the Hebrew title of Theodor Herzl's novel Altneuland. It grew fast under British rule, above all after the riots of 1921 and 1929 pushed Jewish residents out of Jaffa, and became a municipality in its own right in 1934.

The 1930s gave the city its face. Architects who had trained in Germany and central Europe, several of them at the Bauhaus, built thousands of flat-roofed blocks with balconies, ribbon windows and shaded pilotis, adapting the International Style to the heat. That collection, listed by UNESCO in 2003 as the White City, is the largest of its kind anywhere. Italian aircraft bombed the city in 1940, and it grew again with refugees after the Second World War.

Israel's independence was declared on 14 May 1948 in a hall on Rothschild Boulevard. Jaffa fell during the fighting that followed and most of its Arab inhabitants left; in 1950 the two were merged as Tel Aviv-Yafo. The centre declined through the 1970s and 1980s as families moved to the suburbs, then turned around from the 1990s: the old buildings were restored, Neve Tzedek and Florentin were rediscovered, towers rose along the Ayalon, and a technology industry made the city the country's economic engine.

The city calls itself the non-stop city and behaves like it. Cafés fill from breakfast, restaurants are busy late, and clubs and bars in Florentin, the port and around the markets run until dawn, with Thursday and Friday nights the peak. Beach culture underpins everything: swimming before work, matkot bat-and-ball games along the sand, sunset crowds on the promenade, and the Friday afternoon drumming circle at the southern beaches.

It is the secular and liberal counterweight to Jerusalem. The city has a large LGBT community and hosts one of the biggest Pride parades in the region; its Shabbat is partly a working one, and Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, French and English mix on the streets. Immigration keeps changing it: the descendants of Yemenite, Balkan, Iraqi and Polish Jews live alongside newer arrivals from the former Soviet Union, France and Ethiopia, and south Tel Aviv has a large community of African asylum seekers.

Culturally it carries national institutions — the Israeli Philharmonic, the Habima and Cameri theatres, the Batsheva Dance Company, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art — alongside street art in Florentin, independent galleries and a strong music scene. Politics is public here: Rabin Square, named after the prime minister assassinated at its edge in 1995, is the country's main site of demonstration and commemoration. Manners are direct to the point of bluntness, informality is prized, and strangers give advice freely.

About 495,000 people live in Tel Aviv-Yafo itself, at the centre of the Gush Dan metropolitan area of roughly four million, which takes in Ramat Gan, Givatayim, Holon, Bat Yam, Bnei Brak and Herzliya. Many who work in the city cannot afford to live in it: rents are the highest in the country and flats are small, so sharing lasts well into people's thirties and families move to the suburbs along the railway lines.

The economy is technology, finance and services. Start-ups, research centres of multinational companies and venture funds cluster around the Ayalon towers and the Rothschild area; the stock exchange is in the city and the diamond exchange next door in Ramat Gan; and tourism, restaurants and nightlife employ a great many more. Universities at Tel Aviv and nearby Bar-Ilan add a large student population.

The working week runs Sunday to Thursday, with the day beginning early to beat the heat and social life starting late. Friday is the city's favourite day: markets in the morning, long lunches, and the streets full until the small hours. Saturday is for the beach and the parks. Everyday concerns are traffic on the Ayalon, the cost of housing, and the long disruption caused by building the light rail. Since February 2026 the war with Iran has added rocket alerts, shelter drills and periods when gatherings are cancelled to the ordinary routine.

Tel Aviv is where modern Israeli cooking took shape, mixing the food of Jewish communities from across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe with Palestinian and wider Levantine dishes and the produce of the coastal plain. The everyday version is street food: falafel in pita, shawarma carved from the spit, and above all sabich — fried aubergine, hard-boiled egg, salad, tahini and sour amba — which spread from the Iraqi Jewish community of neighbouring Ramat Gan.

Hummus is eaten as a meal, warm, with chickpeas, ful or minced meat on top, at counters in Jaffa and the Yemenite Quarter that often sell out by early afternoon. Shakshuka, eggs poached in spiced tomato and pepper sauce, came with North African immigrants and is on every breakfast menu. Yemenite kitchens contribute malawach and jachnun, layered doughs baked or fried and served with grated tomato and a fiery zhug relish, and Balkan and Turkish bakers supply borekas.

The markets are the city's larder. Carmel Market sells produce, cheese, olives and halva; Levinsky Market deals in spices, dried fruit and cured fish; and Jaffa's bakeries make sesame-crusted bread and trays of knafeh, the warm cheese pastry in syrup. Fish and seafood come from the harbours at Jaffa and the north. The coastal plain around the city gave its name to the Jaffa orange, and the hills inland supply a growing wine industry whose bottles fill the city's bars.