Jericho

Jericho's claim is depth of time: excavation at Tell es-Sultan has found a Natufian settlement beside the spring from around 9000 BC, and a stone tower and town wall of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, about the eighth millennium BC, among the earliest monumental structures known anywhere. Successive settlements rose and fell on the same mound for thousands of years, which is why it stands some twenty metres above the plain. The site was dug by Ernst Sellin, then by John Garstang, and most influentially by Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s, whose stratigraphy reshaped the archaeology of the region.

The Hebrew Bible describes the city's walls falling before Joshua, and the relationship between that account and the excavated layers has been argued over for a century. Under Herod the Great a winter palace complex stood beside Wadi Qelt, and the Gospels place Jesus here with Zacchaeus and Bartimaeus. Byzantine monasteries filled the cliffs, and after the Muslim conquest the Umayyad caliphs built the estate now called Hisham's Palace, whose bath-hall mosaics survived the earthquake that wrecked it; the floors were opened to the public in 2021.

The town shrank to a village under later Islamic rule, revived a little under the Ottomans, and grew sharply after 1948, when refugee camps — Aqbat Jaber and Ein as-Sultan among them — were built beside it and for a time held tens of thousands of people, most of whom left after the 1967 war. Israel occupied the town that year. In May 1994 Jericho and Gaza were the first areas handed to Palestinian self-rule under the Oslo process. UNESCO inscribed Tell es-Sultan in 2023.

Jericho lives by being the warm place. Hill-town families have wintered here for generations, and the town's older hotels, restaurants and shaded gardens were built for that trade rather than for foreign visitors. In winter the centre fills at weekends with Palestinians from Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron eating long lunches under the trees, and in summer it empties into siesta and stillness.

Pilgrimage is the other strand. Orthodox monks have lived in the cliffs of Wadi Qelt and the Mount of Temptation since the Byzantine period, and Christian groups come for the baptism site at the Jordan; Muslim pilgrims gather at Nabi Musa in spring, a tradition begun under the Mamluks and later a major Palestinian national occasion. The town's own population is overwhelmingly Muslim, with a small Christian community and a few Greek Orthodox institutions.

Manners are Palestinian and rural: greetings take time, guests are fed, and refusal is taken as politeness rather than as an answer. The oasis has its own identity within the West Bank — slower, hotter, less political in daily talk, proud of its dates and its antiquity, and conscious that the town sits in Area A while most of the surrounding Jordan Valley is under full Israeli control.

About 20,000 people live in Jericho, with several thousand more in the neighbouring refugee camps of Ein as-Sultan and Aqbat Jaber, making it the largest town in a governorate of roughly 50,000. It is a low-rise place of walled gardens and flat-roofed houses among palm groves, with the desert beginning abruptly at the edge of the irrigated land.

Agriculture and tourism carry the economy. Dates, above all the medjool variety, are the signature crop, along with bananas, citrus, vegetables grown under plastic for the winter market, and flowers; the harvest depends on spring water and on wells, and water allocation is a constant grievance. The archaeological sites, the cable car and the hotels employ many others, and the casino built beside the town in 1998 is closed, though the hotel on the site still takes guests. Jordan Valley farmland and access roads are largely under Israeli control, which limits expansion.

The day is arranged around heat. Work and school start early, the middle of the day is spent indoors from late spring to autumn, and life returns to the streets after sunset, when families sit out and the juice stalls and cafés open. Winter reverses this, with the warmest hours the most sociable. Movement to Ramallah or Jerusalem depends on checkpoints, and the crossing to Jordan a few kilometres east is the town's window on the wider world.

The oasis supplies the table. Medjool dates are the town's best-known product — large, soft and sold fresh at the roadside in autumn — and turn up stuffed with walnuts or almonds, pressed into date syrup, and baked into ma'amoul cakes. Bananas, oranges, lemons and grapefruit from the plantations are pressed into juice at stalls around the centre, and winter vegetables from the valley reach markets across the West Bank.

Cooking is Palestinian, with the hill-town dishes served in the valley's restaurants: musakhan, chicken with onions, sumac and oil on taboon bread; maqluba, the upturned pot of rice, aubergine and meat; mansaf with lamb and jameed yoghurt for celebrations; and stuffed vegetables and vine leaves. Grilled meat is the default at the garden restaurants, preceded by hummus, mutabbal, tabbouleh, pickles and warm bread. Fish from farms in the valley appears on some menus.

Drinks match the climate: fresh juice, lemonade with mint, tamarind and carob cordials in summer, and cardamom-heavy Arabic coffee and very sweet tea with sage or mint all year. Sweets are the usual Palestinian ones — knafeh, baklava, ma'amoul — often eaten late in the evening. Alcohol is uncommon in the town's restaurants, though some hotels serve it.