Ein Gedi Nature Reserve

The parks authority sells Ein Gedi as three separate visits, not one. Nahal David has its own entrance and ticket office in the north, Nahal Arugot has its own in the south, and the En Gedi Antiquities site, built around a sixth-century synagogue mosaic, has a third gate between them. Each has its own telephone number. Each has to be booked separately. The saving grace is the ticket itself: entry bought for any one of the three is good for same-day entry to the other two.

The two canyons are not variations on each other. Nahal David is short, steep-sided and busy, and its lower section leads in about an hour, on the parks authority's own timing, to David's Waterfall. Nahal Arugot is the longer and harder of the two, and the authority's route notes give it as 4.5 kilometres there and back to the Hidden Waterfall or 7 kilometres to the upper pools, at three to five hours and up to about half a day. The Arugot walk splits into a red trail that stays dry on the northern bank and a blue trail that goes down into the streambed and gets wet.

Linking the three is Shvil HaNaveh, the oasis path, with interpretation panels on the wildlife, the invasive species and the sinkholes along the shore below. The stretch between Nahal David and the antiquities gate is accessible and gently graded; the continuation to Nahal Arugot is steeper. A vehicle road runs alongside it with parking bays, for anyone who would rather drive between the gates.

The catchments explain why the two streams behave so differently in a storm. The parks authority's brochure gives Nahal David a collecting area of about 18 square kilometres, so it floods only when rain falls on Ein Gedi itself. Nahal Arugot is about 40 kilometres long and gathers from roughly 200 square kilometres reaching back to the Hebron hills, so it can run hard on a day that is dry at the gate.

• Nahal David: the short canyon, the waterfall, the accessible path, and the crowds
• Nahal Arugot: the long canyon, the Hidden Waterfall and the upper pools, graded for fit walkers
• En Gedi Antiquities: the synagogue and village, a separate cheaper ticket, no reservation needed on the English page
• Shvil HaNaveh: the linking oasis path, accessible between Nahal David and the antiquities
• One ticket to any of the three admits you to all three on the same day

The springs are not fed by local weather. The parks authority describes rain falling on the Judaean Mountains, seeping into the underground water table, moving east and finally welling up inside the reserve, which is why the canyons run in August as well as in February. The four springs are unequal: David's Spring feeds Nahal David and Arugot Spring feeds Nahal Arugot, while the Shulamit and Ein Gedi springs emerge on the slopes between them and support the vegetation there rather than a stream.

Not all of that water reaches the streams. The parks authority states plainly in its own brochure that a significant amount of the reserve's spring water is trapped and used by Kibbutz Ein Gedi and its surroundings. It goes further, and says the oasis flora has been greatly diminished since neighbouring settlements began taking part of the reserve's water for agriculture, and that the authority is now investing considerable effort in restoring the rare plant populations. It is an unusual thing for an operator to print about the community next door, and the clearest published statement of the trade-off the oasis lives under.

The comparison the brochure reaches for is the botanist Michael Zohary's description of Ein Gedi in the 1920s: dense groves of trees and bushes dominated by jujube, acacia, maerua and cordia. What a visitor walks through now is thinner than that, and the restoration is deliberate rather than natural. At the Ein Gedi spring an irrigation system installed in recent years is being used to bring the vegetation back, which the parks authority's route notes describe without euphemism.

The parks authority called the flood an extreme event, unlike anything seen in the area for many years. Ynet reported on 8 May 2025 that about 35 millimetres of rain fell in a very short period; that many trails were washed away entirely and others badly eroded; that the ancient synagogue was flooded and would need conservation work; and that footbridges, railings, steps, signage, roads, power, water, sewage and public toilets were all hit. Rare plants were damaged. The reserve closed completely.

What is open in August 2026 depends on which of the operator's pages is read. The English page still carries a notice saying Wadi David is open only along the accessible path to the first waterfall, a walk of about five minutes each way, and that all other areas including the Ein Gedi Spring and Dodim Cave remain closed until further notice. The Hebrew page, which is updated more often, describes the same shortened Nahal David walk as about ten minutes, and then goes on to offer a strenuous three-hour route from Tel Goren up to the Ein Gedi Spring, Dodim Cave and Gev Halon, with entry from 08:00 and last admission at 10:00. Those two statements cannot both be current. Telephone *3639 before setting out, which both pages ask visitors to do.

Nahal Arugot is open and altered. The parks authority's own trail article, published in January 2026, is candid about what floods do to it: the upper pools were blocked and emptied by the May 2025 flood, then the floods of December 2025 filled one of them to about two metres, while the deep pool under the Hidden Waterfall was itself temporarily blocked. The waterfall is about eight metres high; as of mid-January 2026 the authority reported it flowing but its pool dry. The advice on the page is to ask the rangers at the gate what the pools are doing that week.

Restoration is not finished and the authority does not pretend it is: its Hebrew page says work is continuing and that it hopes to open further parts of the reserve soon. Treat any published trail list, this one included, as a description of Ein Gedi in normal times rather than a promise about the day of the visit.

• Open: Nahal Arugot to the Hidden Waterfall and the upper pools, graded for fit walkers
• Open: the En Gedi Antiquities site and synagogue, on the usual hours
• Shortened: Nahal David, to the first waterfall only on the accessible path
• Disputed between the operator's own pages: the Ein Gedi Spring, Dodim Cave and Gev Halon route
• Booking: advance reservation for each area separately, per the parks authority

The animals people come for are genuinely wild and genuinely easy to see. Nubian ibex and rock hyraxes live along the lower paths of both canyons and often sit within a few metres of the accessible trail in Nahal David. The ibex is here because of a law: the parks authority's brochure records that Judaean Desert ibex were hunted to the brink of extinction, that the Wild Animal Protection Law of 1955 turned that round, and that the head of an ibex was put into the authority's own emblem in recognition of the rescue. Male ibex rut between September and November and the kids are born between March and April.

The leopards are the harder question. The brochure lists the leopard among the reserve's nocturnal mammals and says that although sightings are rare, footprints, diggings and droppings can sometimes be found. The parks authority's January 2026 trail article puts it in the past tense instead: several leopards called Nahal Arugot home in the early 2000s, probably 200 to 250 of this small desert subspecies survive worldwide, mostly in Yemen, Oman and Saudi Arabia, and the Israeli population at its peak was estimated at 10 to 20 animals.

Some of the botany is not original either, and the parks authority says so. None of the Jericho balsam trees that stood in the reserve in the 1940s survives. The Jericho balsam growing at Ein Gedi today was raised from seed collected in the balsam groves near Ma'oz Chaim in the northern Jordan Valley and planted here in 1962. It is a nature reserve with a replanting date, and knowing it changes what the grove is.

The rarities that are original are worth the detour. About ten specimens of Maerua crassifolia are left in Israel, and five of them are in this reserve. Ein Gedi also holds the country's largest concentration of Cordia sinensis, whose sticky orange fruit feeds Tristram's grackle, bulbuls and fruit bats. For several tropical species the oasis is simply the northernmost point at which they grow at all, which is the sentence that explains why a fourteen square kilometre patch of desert has a national reserve wrapped around it.

Above the Ein Gedi spring, on the crest of a cliff looking out over the Dead Sea and the mountains of Moab, stand the walls of a Chalcolithic temple built roughly five thousand years ago. Yohanan Aharoni found it in a survey in 1956, Yosef Naveh dug a trial trench the following year, and systematic excavation began in 1962 within Benjamin Mazar's project for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israel Exploration Society, with David Ussishkin supervising the temple itself. The enclosure has a main northern building, a smaller eastern one, a circular installation about three metres across and two gatehouses giving on to the springs.

It is bound up with the most famous hoard in Israeli archaeology, and the binding is contested. In 1961 Pessah Bar-Adon found 429 objects, 416 of them copper, in a cave in Nahal Mishmar to the south; the parks authority's brochure describes them flatly as ceremonial vessels that had apparently been used in this temple, and they are on show at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Ussishkin proposed the link in 1971 and it became the standard reading. The objection is simple and has never been answered: not a single find directly connects the hoard to the temple, and Bar-Adon himself suggested ruins nearer the cave as the source.

The reserve holds a long settlement history besides. Tel Goren, excavated by Mazar between 1961 and 1965, carries remains from the Iron Age, the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods, and the ovens and vessel fragments found in its courtyards are read as the residue of the balsam perfume industry that made Ein Gedi rich and secretive. Two water-powered flour mills survive from the Mamluk period, one of them beside the Ein Gedi spring. The parks authority notes that David is said to have hidden from Saul at Ein Gedi, and adds that there are no archaeological finds to support the story.

The most recent thing worth stopping at is a memorial. At the foot of the path up to the Ein Gedi spring near Tel Goren stands a curved concrete bench in the shape of people sitting round a campfire, designed in 1972 by the architect Dan Zur, whose brother was among the dead. On 9 April 1942 seven Hashomer Hatzair members of about seventeen and their Palmach escort were killed at Ein Gedi when hand grenades exploded beside a campfire during a Passover trek to Masada. How the grenades reached the fire has never been established.