Rosh Hanikra Grottoes

The cliff is the western end of a ridge the Hebrew sources call Rechess HaSulam, the Ladder ridge: an anticline whose axis runs from the south west up into Lebanon, rising to about 300 metres. Where it meets the sea it presents a face of roughly 70 metres, built from the Rosh Hanikra member of the Deir Hanna formation, bands of chert and of chalk with a little travertine. The chalk is soft. The sea has spent a very long time taking it out band by band, and the caves are the hollows left behind.

Below that band lies a harder limestone layer, most of it now under water, and the sea has cut into that too: the northern grotto is the only one formed entirely in hard rock. There are further caves below the waterline, and that is the detail worth carrying away. Caves cut at several heights mean the sea did not always stand where it stands now, and each set was carved at the level of its own era.

There is matching evidence on land. Between the deeper caves, remains have been found that were laid down in a dry-land environment, and the strip from here south to Achziv holds traces of ancient farming, winepresses among them, on ground that carries no soil today. The reading that follows is that the shoreline once ran hundreds of metres further west, beyond the islands offshore.

Those islands, Tchelet, Shahaf, Nahliely and Achziv, are the surviving heads of an old kurkar ridge, about 20 dunams of rock in all. All four are nature reserves and nobody lands on them, but they are the thing to look at from the clifftop while waiting for a cabin.

Before 1968 there was no land entrance. The geographer Yosef Braslavi described swimming in from open water with a party of walkers to work out what was producing the booming heard around the headland; his answer was that the waves roll into the caves and throw back doubled and trebled echoes. That noise is still the strongest impression the place makes, and it is why one cave carries the Arabic name Maghharat an-Nuh, the cave of sighs.

Development as a place a family could visit began in 1962, under the Sulam Tzor regional council: a restaurant at the top of the cliff, the widening of the grottoes and footpaths cut through them. A cable car was announced in 1963, to be supplied by a Swiss firm. The 400 metre tunnel followed in 1968, linking the caves to each other and to the old railway alignment.

It is worth being clear about what that leaves. The caves are natural and the sea made them. The route through them is not: it is a widened, floored and lit walkway, and some of the passage between one grotto and the next was cut in the 1960s.

The upper station stands beside the car park on Route 4, a few metres short of the border, on the lip of the chalk about 70 metres above the water. The lower station faces the sea behind a white rock-like wall put there to take the spray. The line between them is 102 metres long and hangs at 60 degrees, with the drive and control gear at the top and the deflection sheave and tension weights at the bottom.

The installation is Austrian, by Doppelmayr, working with the Technion in Haifa; the cabins, fifteen people each, came from Swoboda, a firm Doppelmayr later bought. It is an aerial tramway on a single cable, each cabin fixed to it by four grips, where most ropeways use one cable to carry the cabins and a second to haul them.

The dates do not agree and no source resolves them. The Hebrew and English encyclopaedia articles on the site both say the cable car was completed in 1968, soon after the tunnel, and a newsreel item from that year is titled for a new cable car on these cliffs. The Hebrew article on the cable car itself gives 1987 for the Doppelmayr line now running. The likeliest reading is that the second replaced the first, but no source says so.

The claim the site is best known for is that this is the steepest cable car in the world. Wikipedia has carried that sentence with a request for a source since 2017, and no manufacturer's statement confirming it could be found for this page. The gradient of 60 degrees is not in dispute; the superlative attached to it has never been sourced. The weather is documented: very rough conditions shut the line down, for wind speed and to keep the cabins out of the spray, and the operating company's own figure is two or three days a year.

• Line 102 metres, gradient 60 degrees, upper station about 70 metres above the sea
• Doppelmayr with the Technion; Swoboda cabins of fifteen
• Single carrying cable, four grips per cabin, no separate haul rope
• Closed by storms two or three days a year, on the company's own figure

In 1941, after Allied forces took Lebanon from Vichy control, Britain decided to join the coastal railway in Palestine to the Lebanese network, and through it to Aleppo and Turkey, so that troops and equipment could move by rail. The obstacle was this ridge. Two tunnels were driven under it and joined by a bridge thrown over one of the larger grottoes. The digging was done by the 40th Company of the South African engineers, with New Zealand and Australian units on the wider job, and an inscription over the southern portal records the completion.

The Hebrew record is precise: the tunnel was inaugurated on 14 August 1942, the Haifa to Beirut alignment was finished on 24 August, and the line reached Tripoli station on 18 December. The Haifa to Beirut to Tripoli railway was the first rail link between the networks of Europe and of North Africa. It never carried a civilian service: the British kept it under military control, and a decision taken in 1947 to open it to the public was never acted on.

It lasted five and a half years. The bridge was spared during the Night of the Bridges in 1946, then destroyed in the 1948 war to stop Lebanese arms and troops moving south. Here the sources part company. The Hebrew accounts, citing the site's own history page, date the charge to 14 March 1948 and credit the 21st Battalion of the Carmeli Brigade. The English account puts the same 21st Battalion under the Palmach and dates the demolition to late February. The unit number is what both agree on.

Repairing it was judged too expensive. The border runs through the northern tunnel, so that tunnel was sealed and remains sealed. The southern one is now part of the visit: it is the passage that leads to the grotto route. An audio-visual presentation runs in its northern neighbour's southern end, as close to Lebanon as a ticket goes.

On 23 March 1949 the Lebanese and Israeli delegations signed the General Armistice Agreement that closed the Lebanese front of the 1948 war. The text ends 'DONE at Ras En Naqoura on the twenty-third of March nineteen forty-nine, in the presence of the Personal Deputy of the United Nations Acting Mediator on Palestine and the United Nations Chief of Staff of the Truce Supervision Organization'. Ras en Naqoura is this headland. Lebanese forces withdrew under the agreement, and Israeli prisoners were released across the line here the same day.

Kibbutz Rosh HaNikra had gone up on the ridge two months earlier, on 6 January 1949, founded by demobilised fighters of the Palmach's Yiftach Brigade, and moved to its permanent site on 1 October 1950. The kibbutz runs the attraction: the cable car, the film, the shop, the kiosk and the tunnels are its business, alongside dairy, bananas, avocados and citrus.

The crossing is the only functioning one between Israel and Lebanon. It is worked by the Israel Defence Forces and by UNIFIL, and ordinary visitors cannot pass through it. What it gets used for is the closing act of negotiations: on 16 July 2008 Samir Kuntar was returned to Lebanon through this gate and the bodies of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser were handed back through it. A poem about waiting for peace is mounted on the Israeli side, an apology from the management of the Cairo to Jaffa to Haifa to Beirut railway that lists everything broken and ends on the detail that peace is running late.

The protected ground here was assembled piece by piece over almost forty years, which is why nobody can give a single figure for it. The islands became a reserve of 311 dunams in 1965. The main reserve followed in 1969 at 500 dunams, with a further 765 added in 1996. The beach was declared in 2003, at 230 dunams, and a national park covers another 220. Whether those areas overlap is not set out in any source consulted here.

The sea took much longer. Two marine reserves were planned at first, one off Rosh Hanikra and one off Achziv, then merged into one, and the merged proposal was cut back from Israel's territorial water limit at about 22 kilometres out to 15, losing roughly a third of the area. What was declared on 6 November 2019 covers about 100,062 dunams: some 7 kilometres of indented coast from the Lebanese border to the northern edge of Nahariya. It is the largest and northernmost marine reserve in the country, and it opened to visitors on 6 June 2023.

The wildlife is local rather than decorative. The shore from Rosh Hanikra to Achziv is the only place in the world where Galilee sea-lavender grows: it was treated for years as the Greek species before being separated out. Fruit bats roost in the roofs of the grottoes, rock doves and swifts nest in the cliff fissures, and the loggerhead turtle breeds off this coast, with hatchlings crossing the sand on a few full-moon nights each year. The Mediterranean monk seal was seen in the caves until the 1950s.

The reserve is also where more cartilaginous fish are recorded on dives than anywhere else in Israeli water, close to two fifths of all such sightings, with two shark species logged inside it. That is a statement about the sea rather than the grottoes, which are lit, floored and full of people: the wild part of Rosh Hanikra starts where the walkway ends.