Qasr al-Yahud Baptismal Site

The approach is short and unmistakable. From Route 90, the Jericho bypass, a signposted turn runs east for about 1.5 kilometres to a gate in the military border fence, and the road continues east to the site. The operator locates that turn two ways: roughly 5 kilometres north of the Route 1 junction on its English page, about 2.5 kilometres north of the Deir Hijleh monastery entrance in its brochure. Look for the sign; the gate is manned.

Inside, the plan is compact: a car park, a visitor service centre, toilets and changing rooms, a shaded gathering plaza, a pergola for prayer and a terrace over the river and the eastern bank. From the terrace, steps and the wooden deck installed in 2026 run down to the water. Immersion is allowed only in that stretch. Crossing the river is prohibited, the water is not drinkable, and food is barred from the baptismal area.

The dress rule catches people out more than any other. The parks authority permits entry to the water in clothing that covers the shoulders and the knees, and not in a swimsuit; the service centre sells towels and white baptismal robes, along with drinks, snacks, souvenirs, books, hats and sunscreen. What the authority will not do is supply a priest: it states plainly that it cannot arrange clergy or a baptism ceremony, which groups have to bring with them.

Two dates fill the site: Easter, in April, and Epiphany in January, which the parks authority's Hebrew page gives as 18 and 19 January and its English brochure places anywhere between 12 and 24 January depending on the denomination. On those days the terrace becomes a viewing gallery for mass baptisms held by several churches at once, on both banks.

The site carries more than one tradition, which is why it is sacred to Jews and Christians on different grounds. The parks authority's material sets out four. This is where Joshua 3 places the crossing of the Israelites into the land, the priests standing in the riverbed with the ark while the water heaped up at Adam. It is where 2 Kings 2 places Elijah's ascent in a chariot of fire after he handed his powers to Elisha. It is where Naaman, the Aramean commander, immersed himself seven times on Elisha's instruction and was cured of his leprosy in 2 Kings 5. And it is where the Gospels place John baptising, and baptising Jesus.

The Arabic name preserves the first of those. Qasr al-Yahud means the palace of the Jews, and it attaches to the fortress-like Greek Orthodox monastery above the bank rather than to the water. Al-Maghtas, the other Arabic name in use, simply means the place of the baptism, and it is used on both sides of the river.

Which bank was the bank is genuinely unresolved. The sixth-century Madaba mosaic map marks Bethabara, the house of the ford, on the western side. The excavated Byzantine remains, however, are on the eastern side: churches, baptism pools, hermitages and caves running up the Wadi al-Kharrar, dug between 1996 and 2002, and it is that eastern complex that UNESCO inscribed in 2015 as the Baptism Site "Bethany beyond the Jordan", in Jordan. Jodi Magness's caution, quoted by the Biblical Archaeology Society, applies to both banks: no site here has archaeological remains showing continuous veneration from the first century onwards.

The honest description of the western bank, then, is a place of long and documented pilgrimage rather than a place with a first-century layer under it. Byzantine pilgrims came in numbers from the fourth to the seventh centuries, traffic fell away under early Islamic rule and revived under the Crusaders, and Ottoman-era travellers came again in the nineteenth century. Pope John Paul II worshipped here in 2000.

The buildings that make this landscape strange are strung along a paved road running roughly 1.5 kilometres behind the river. Nearest the junction, about 350 metres from the water, is the Greek Orthodox monastery of John the Baptist, the largest of them and the structure that gave the site its Arabic name. It stands on the foundations of the earliest Byzantine monastery here. Sixth-century evidence, on the parks authority's account, has it built under the emperor Anastasius I, who ruled from 491 to 518; an earthquake destroyed it in 1024; Manuel Komnenos rebuilt it in the twelfth century, and the Knights Templar gave it the fortified form it still has. Procopius records a cistern built at the site for Justinian around 560, which a visitor in 1883 found still standing in almost perfect condition.

Everything else on the road is modern, most of it built between the World Wars and the 1950s. The parks authority's inventory, walking south: the octagonal Franciscan chapel, which it dates to 1956; the Syriac Orthodox monastery of John the Baptist, partly destroyed by an earthquake the same year; the Coptic monastery of John the Baptist, built in the 1940s, with Coptic pilgrims' graves beside it; the hexagonal Russian chapel and the smaller bell chapel next to it; the Ethiopian monastery of the Holy Trinity, with a church and guest rooms; and the Romanian monastery, whose green-domed church the authority dates to 1934. The Custody of the Holy Land has held roughly 135 acres here since 1632, on the Franciscans' own account.

None of it can be entered on an ordinary visit. The parks authority's Hebrew page carries a standing warning that the monasteries and the road it calls the monastery axis are forbidden because of the danger of mines, and the English brochure says the remains are off limits for the same reason. The compounds are looked at from the road, and photographed from a distance.

The one legitimate way in is a guided walk the parks authority sells itself, about two hours, ₪55 a head, departing from the service centre. It runs on published dates rather than on demand, subject to weather and to Home Front Command instructions, and it fills. Anyone who wants to see the frescoes should book it rather than turn up hoping.

• Ancient and in place: the fortified Greek Orthodox monastery of John the Baptist, on Byzantine foundations, with twelfth-century rebuilding and Templar defences
• Recorded but not on the visitor route: the cistern Procopius attributes to Justinian, around 560
• Twentieth-century and abandoned in 1967: Franciscan, Syriac Orthodox, Coptic, Russian, Ethiopian and Romanian compounds along the monastery road
• Cleared of mines but still closed to independent visitors: all seven monastery compounds, fenced since the 1960s
• Built new for visitors in 2026: the wooden deck, the prayer pergola, the showers and changing block, the roads and the car parks

The mines went in after the Six Day War, when the Jordan became the border and infiltration across it was constant. Israeli forces seeded the ground with more than 6,500 landmines from the late 1960s into the 1970s and booby-trapped the church buildings. A survey before clearance put the burden at roughly 2,600 anti-tank and 1,200 anti-personnel mines, plus improvised devices, over about a square kilometre.

Clearance began in the week of 20 March 2018, run by the Israel National Mine Action Authority, the Israel Defense Forces, the British demining charity the HALO Trust and the Israeli supervising contractor 4CI. The money was split: about NIS 10 million from the HALO Trust, raised largely from donations, and about NIS 7.5 million from the Israeli government, after the project sat two years waiting on funding. The Romanian monastery, the seventh and last, was declared clear in June 2019. Some 500 remaining mines were destroyed in one controlled explosion on 9 April 2020, and the last sappers left the same day, 53 years after the area was closed.

What the teams found inside had been sealed since January 1967. James Cowan, the HALO Trust's chief executive, described it as walking into a time capsule, with beer still on the shelf and the tables still laid for dinner. The Franciscans got their keys back in October 2020, and on 10 January 2021 Francesco Patton, the Custos of the Holy Land, celebrated the first Mass in their church in 54 years; the previous one had been said on 7 January 1967.

The clearance did not turn the area into open country. Fenced minefields remain in the wider valley, the brochure is unambiguous about not crossing a fence, and the instruction to keep to official roads covers the verges as well as the tarmac. Church plots are handed back to their denominations one at a time as restoration allows, which is why the monastery road stays closed while individual buildings come back into use.

The Jordan at this point is a fraction of the river the biblical accounts describe, and that is measurable. EcoPeace Middle East, the cross-border environmental organisation that campaigns on the river, puts the fall in annual flow from more than 1.3 billion cubic metres to under 30 million, with about 96 per cent of the fresh water diverted upstream by Israel, Jordan and Syria for drinking and irrigation. What keeps the lower channel wet in places is saline water and treated and untreated sewage.

Water quality at the site has been tested and the results have not been steady. Sampling by the environment ministry, the health ministry, the parks authority and the water authority found a faecal coliform count of 2,300 per 100 millilitres in November 2013, against a bathing standard of 400; six months earlier the same measurement was 190. EcoPeace's Israeli director Gidon Bromberg described the water south of Alumot as a mixture of untreated and partly treated sewage, agricultural runoff, fish pond waste and saline water. The health ministry, through its spokeswoman Einav Shimron, replied that there is no raw sewage at Qasr al-Yahud and that the streams feeding the Jordan have improved considerably.

Campaigners and officials therefore disagree about how safe immersion is, and no daily reading is published at the gate. The rules the parks authority does publish are worth following on their own terms: enter only in the designated stretch, do not swallow the water, do not drink it, and rinse and change afterwards in the block built for the purpose. The bank is mud rather than sand, the current is real, and the authority states outright that because of the shape of the bank, the current and the mud, immersion in the river cannot be made accessible to wheelchair users.

The setting is worth a minute once the ceremonies stop. The river cuts through soft white rock that crumbles at a touch, and the tangle of trees and reeds along it is the one green line in the Jericho steppe, sheltering birds and animals with nowhere else to go. The area was proposed as a nature reserve under the British Mandate for that reason.