Ein Bokek Beach

The beach runs along the foot of the hotel line at Ein Bokek and continues south toward Hamei Zohar. Before the rebuild the frontage was cut into hotel-controlled stretches with no continuous public access, even though beaches on this shore are public land; the Times of Israel reported that the new works joined them into an uninterrupted seafront. In 2017 the tourism ministry counted 16 new free and accessible beaches along the run between Ein Bokek and Hamei Zohar.

The order of things going inland is deliberate and was designed as a sequence: water, beach, promenade, a beach park planted with a grid of date palms, then the car parks, then the hotels and the road. The paved promenade carries cold drinking fountains, outdoor fitness equipment, ping pong tables and free solar charging points for phones. Behind it the Ein Bokek mall holds restaurants, a dining level and shops selling Dead Sea cosmetics.

On the sand the operator provides shade sheets, sunbeds, and chairs and umbrellas marked with the Dead Sea Land brand, free to use. Showers, changing rooms, public toilets and a fresh drinking water fountain are on the beach itself. There is no admission gate and no ticket.

Parking is the catch. The beach lot is a regulated blue-and-white bay lot paid through the Pango app, and the operator's own page says it fills, listing the upper Palms car park and the upper Conference car park as the overflow. Both are a short walk down to the water.

Pond 5 covers roughly 80 square kilometres and is the first and largest in the chain of evaporation ponds at the southern end of the lake. Brine is pumped from the northern basin, spread thin in the south and left to the sun, and the salts that come out of solution settle on the pond floor. ICL's own figure is about 20 million tonnes of salt precipitating in Pond 5 every year, which raises the bed by about 20 centimetres a year and pushes the water surface up with it.

That is the opposite of the problem the northern shore has. North of here the lake is falling by more than a metre a year and the beaches are stranded or lost to sinkholes; at Ein Bokek the danger has always been the water climbing into the hotel foundations. ICL states that if the level in Pond 5 rises above a certain point it may damage the foundations of the hotels standing near the water's edge and the other infrastructure on the western shoreline, and that this is why the beach and hotel protection project was begun at all.

The counter-measure is a dredger. Under an agreement signed in October 2017, ICL's board approved a budget of about $280 million to harvest salt from Pond 5, covering the company's 80 per cent share of the cost over twelve years against the Israeli government's 20 per cent. The vessel that does the work has been operating since November 2020: 141 metres long, 24 metres wide, with an electrical output of 10 MW, which ICL calls the largest electric dredger of its kind in the world. It lifts roughly 8 million tonnes a year, and two or three of them are needed to keep pace with the 20 million tonnes that settle.

None of this is hidden from the visitor, and it is worth knowing before arriving with expectations formed by photographs of the northern shore. There are no cauliflower salt formations breaking the surface here and no retreating shoreline to walk out across. What there is instead is a level, maintained, industrially managed body of brine with a lifeguard watching it.

Almost nothing on this frontage is older than the present decade and a half. Work began in late 2012 and finished at the end of 2016. Engineers raised the level of the beach by two metres and sank underground clay barriers, impermeable to brine, along the whole length of the hotel district. The Times of Israel gave the bill as 200 million shekels, split 60.5 per cent to the government and 39.5 per cent to Dead Sea Works. Since the beaches were being excavated anyway, a continuous seafront promenade was added on top of the flood works.

The landscape design is by Shlomo Aronson Architects, for the Dead Sea Preservation Government Company Ltd, with a team led by Barbara Aronson and including Ittai Aronson, Elia Shoshani, Svetlana Sirota, Daniel Shorer, Ayelet Ben David and Maayan Turgeman. The practice describes the brief as a response to rising water in the southern basin caused by the mining, and the built answer as accessible decks bringing bathers into the water, large shade structures on the beach, a beach park under a grid of date palms, and irrigation drawn from the hotels' treated wastewater. One decision shows at night: Barbara Aronson told the Times of Israel that the beach itself was deliberately left unlit so that walkers see the lights of Jordan across the water. The scheme took first prize from the Israeli Association of Landscape Architects in 2018, in the category of landscape restoration and infrastructure projects.

Tourism Minister Yariv Levin dedicated the first section on 3 April 2017. The published figures for what was opened do not agree, and it is worth saying so rather than picking one: the Times of Israel described a first phase of five kilometres, with about 12 kilometres eventually planned, while Israel National News reported that the government company had built a four-kilometre promenade and put its infrastructure and development spending at 500 million shekels. The two accounts may be measuring different things, and no source read for this page reconciles them.

The hotel strip behind the beach is older but not much. Wikipedia dates the first hotel at Ein Bokek to 1960 and counts fourteen by 2000. The Times of Israel put the strip at roughly 4,000 rooms in 2017; when the Israel Land Authority and the tourism ministry opened a new tender in March 2025, the Jerusalem Post reported the existing stock as 3,865 rooms across 33 hotels, of which fifteen were then operating, with a plan allowing for some 9,047 more.

• Rebuilt: the beach surface itself, raised two metres between late 2012 and the end of 2016
• New and buried: clay cut-off barriers along the length of the hotel district, put in to stop brine reaching the foundations
• New and visible: the seafront promenade, the shade structures, the accessible bathing decks, the date palm beach park, the lawns and the car parks
• Deliberately absent: lighting on the beach itself, so that the view east is the Jordanian shore rather than glare
• Not natural: the body of water in front of it all, which is a working evaporation pond kept at level by pumping and dredging
• Genuinely old, and inland: the Ein Bokek spring, the early Roman workshop on the shore and the fort above the wadi

The resort takes its name from a real spring in Nahal Bokek, the canyon-like gorge that comes down out of the cliffs immediately behind the strip, which carries water and its own flora and fauna. The spring has been recorded flowing at 40 to 50 cubic metres an hour, and an ancient aqueduct carried it toward the shore.

Two ancient sites sit beside it. On the shore itself is what the excavators called the officina: an early Roman building, published by Moshe Fischer, Mordechai Gichon and Oren Tal as En Boqeq II, The Officina (Mainz, 2000), read as a workshop making balsam perfume and medicines, and put out of use during the first Jewish revolt. It survives today as what Wikipedia describes as the partly reconstructed remains of an ancient perfume and medicine factory, which is to say the visitor is looking at a modern presentation of an excavated plan rather than at standing Roman walls.

Above the wadi is Metzad Bokek, a small fort commanding the road, excavated by Mordechai Gichon of Tel Aviv University between 1968 and 1970 as a teaching and research dig through which a generation of Israeli archaeologists passed. Gichon published it in 1993 as En Boqeq I, a report on the late Roman and Byzantine castellum, and it is still cited as one of the outstanding excavation reports for the Byzantine period in the country.

When the fort was built is not agreed. Gichon's reading places it with the tetrarchic and Constantinian frontier works of the fourth century; an Israel Antiquities Authority excavation report on the neighbouring fort of Mezad Tamar separates the Dead Sea forts into those built in the Roman period and those, naming 'En Boqeq and Rosh Zohar, built during the Byzantine period. The difference is a century or more, and nothing on the beach settles it.

The entry is the gentlest on the Israeli shore, which is the main reason first-time bathers are sent here. The water is a pond rather than an open lake: no waves, no swell, a shallow and even bed, and a level that does not move between visits. Accessible decks run out from the beach into the brine, and there is a narrow path leading directly into the water for people who cannot manage the surface underfoot.

That surface is salt. ICL's own account of Pond 5 is that the salts come out of solution and settle on the pond bed, about 20 centimetres of new crystal a year, and it is that crust rather than sand or mud that a bather stands on. Footwear that can be worn into the water is the single most useful thing to bring, and it is not sold on the beach.

The bathing rules are the same across the whole lake and they are not decorative: float on your back, keep your head out, do not shave beforehand, do not swallow the water, keep it out of your eyes, and rinse in fresh water afterwards. Twenty minutes at a time is enough. The freshwater showers on this beach are free and there are drinking fountains on the promenade, so the rinse is easy to do properly rather than in a hurry at a hotel.

Lifeguards are the reason to use this beach rather than an empty stretch of shoreline. Bathe when the lifeguard is on duty and inside the published hours, which end at 16:00 in the winter half of the year. Wheelchairs can be borrowed from the lifeguard's booth.