Makhtesh Ramon (Ramon Crater)

The parks authority's own account of the geology runs in order. Soft continental sediments, sandstone among them, were laid down first. The sea came over them and hard marine rock, limestone, formed on top. A fault buckled the whole stack into an anticline while it was still submerged. The anticline rose, the water withdrew, and the hard cap began to wear off the top of the fold, exposing the soft rock underneath. Later the anticline rose again, tilted east towards the Arava as the Great Rift Valley moved, and a river running east along the crest emptied the soft heart of the fold far faster than it could cut through the walls. What is left is a valley ringed by cliffs and drained by one stream, which is the definition of a makhtesh.

NASA's Earth Observatory tells the same story in fewer steps and reaches further back: more than 200 million years ago this ground lay under the Tethys Sea, and once the water receded, wind and rain flattened the top of a hill of hard rock over a soft limestone core while rivers hollowed out its inside. The measurements are close but not identical. The US Geological Survey, which maintains a satellite calibration site on the floor, gives approximately 40 kilometres in length, 2 to 10 kilometres in width and about 500 metres in depth, at an altitude of 557 metres. NASA gives the same length and depth but a width of 2 to 19 kilometres, the difference being where the rim is drawn.

Nobody agrees on how many of these there are, either, which is worth knowing before reading a confident sentence about it. The International Dark-Sky Association's 2017 designation document describes the Ramon as the largest and most impressive of three erosion craters in the Negev. Hadassah Magazine, writing in 2006, called it the largest of five. The parks authority sidesteps the count and says only that craters formed by this process are found in the Negev and Sinai. The disagreement is about whether small examples on the surrounding ridges qualify, not about this one.

• About 40 km long, 2 to 10 km wide, about 500 m deep (USGS)
• Floor at 557 m above sea level (USGS)
• NASA gives the width as 2 to 19 km, on a different reading of the rim
• Drained east by a single stream, Nahal Ramon (parks authority)

The visitor centre stands in the middle of the northern cliff, at the edge of Mitzpe Ramon, and the parks authority is explicit that entrance is by reservation only, with the museum entrance closing an hour before the site does. Adult admission is ₪31 and a child ₪16, with ₪26 for a student or an adult in a group and ₪14 for a child in a group. Parking is charged; the authority points visitors who would rather not pay for it to the free lot at Hai Ramon. Groups of 30 or more can book outside the published hours for an extra fee.

Inside, one half of the building explains the makhtesh and the other half is a memorial. Ilan Ramon flew as payload specialist on STS-107, which launched on 16 January 2003 and broke up over Texas on re-entry on 1 February, about sixteen minutes short of its landing. He was the first Israeli in space. The naming is a coincidence people reliably get wrong: the makhtesh, the mountain and the town all carried the name Ramon before the astronaut did, and Mitzpe Ramon means, plainly, Ramon lookout.

The view is the other half of the visit and it is free. From the centre the whole southern wall stands opposite, the eastern and western ends run out of sight, and Har Ardon rises in the east, the hill that gives the makhtesh its heart shape from the air. The Albert Promenade runs south from the centre along the cliff edge towards Har Gamal; northwards, a bridge over the Eilat road leads to a sculpture garden made during conventions of international artists, some of whose pieces are built to sound in the wind.

• Adult ₪31, child ₪16, student or adult in a group ₪26, child in a group ₪14, Israeli senior citizen ₪16
• Entry by reservation only; the museum stops admitting an hour before closing
• Parking is charged at the centre and free at the Hai Ramon lot
• Hai Ramon, the living desert park in the town, is a separate ticket: adult ₪22, child ₪9

The Carpentry, HaNagariya, is the one everybody photographs: a low rise covered in stone prisms, formed when lava rising from below baked the sandstone it passed through, and the rock, cooling, cracked into thousands of polygonal columns that later broke into lengths. The Ammonite Wall, in the southern part of the makhtesh, is a rock face holding the fossilised shells of ammonites, which lived in the sea that covered the Negev. The parks authority states the position on both without hedging: the fossils are a protected natural phenomenon and collecting them is forbidden.

The eastern half holds the colour. Layers of sand in different shades are exposed in a few places, and the eastern part of the makhtesh is threaded with dykes, sheets of igneous rock forced up between the sedimentary layers, along with basalt hills such as Giv'at Ga'ash, built of lava. Karney HaRamon, seven basalt hills in the west, were dedicated to the memory of the seven crew members who died on Columbia, Ilan Ramon among them, and are visible from a walking trail off Har Ramon, which the parks authority calls the highest point in the Negev.

The far east end is where the water and the history are. Ein Saharonim is a spring that in winter makes a stream running for hundreds of metres and often dries out in summer; the vegetation around it is thick by desert standards and it is the surest place in the makhtesh to read animal tracks. On a hill nearby stands Khan Saharonim, a square building with rooms around an inner courtyard, a baking oven and a water reservoir, which served caravans on the Nabataean incense road. That road ran roughly 2,400 kilometres from Arabia to the port of Gaza and was in use from the third century BCE to at least the third century CE. Where it met the northern cliff the Nabataeans built an engineered ascent, Ma'ale Mahamal, watched over by the fort at Metsad Mahamal. UNESCO's 2005 inscription of the Incense Route covers Metsad Nekarot, Khan Saharonim, Metsad Mahamal and the stretch of road linking them.

There are older and stranger things down there too, and the parks authority is careful to say that their purpose is not settled. Nawamis tumuli, stone mounds in two parallel lines that seem to be burials. Sulam Ya'acov, stone arrangements beside old roads that may be camps or may be ceremonial. Shiniyot, cairns built on skylines. And afifonim, two long converging walls forming a funnel that ends in a pit, of which two are known here and which are thought to be animal traps.

This is not a landscape that was left alone and then fenced. Mitzpe Ramon's early economy was planned around the quarries on the crater floor: Hadassah Magazine's account of the town describes its first residents working in clay and quartz workings inside Makhtesh Ramon, and the local council's own history says the settlement was intended to live off crater quarries, industrial plants and tourist sites. Protection came afterwards. The parks authority lists among its own conservation work the reduction of the areas being quarried in the makhtesh, the declaration of those areas as nature reserve, and the rehabilitation of vast tracts of ground that had been dug over.

The Ramon Colors route, the graded dirt road that is the main way into the eastern makhtesh and is passable in an ordinary car, exists because of that repair job. The parks authority built it while rehabilitating the former mining area, signed it with explanations of the geology it passes, and did the work with the Quarry Rehabilitation Foundation. Its stated plan is to turn the abandoned quarry into an open geological museum, with trails for walkers and cyclists. A visitor driving that road is looking at exposed rock and coloured sand from a made surface laid across a repaired excavation, which is worth knowing rather than being disappointed by.

The animals were put back as deliberately as the ground. Asiatic wild asses had disappeared from this country early in the twentieth century. A breeding group was assembled at the Hai-Bar Yotvata reserve from 1968, and 28 animals were released into the Negev between 1982 and 1987, at Ein Saharonim, with ten more in 1992 and 1993 further south; Washington University in St Louis, whose Alan Templeton worked on the population with Ben-Gurion University and the parks authority, put the herd at around 250 by 2013. The parks authority now estimates 250 to 300 living in Makhtesh Ramon and Borot Lots. It also runs feeding stations for birds of prey in the area, to offset the collapse of their natural food supply.

Legal protection came in stages and is still being extended. Two nature reserves were declared inside the makhtesh in 1989, Matsok HaTsinim and Har HaNegev; Matsok HaTsinim was enlarged in 2009 and Har HaNegev in 2009 and again in 2011. What that protects, on the parks authority's count, includes 486 plant species, 71 of them rare, eight of those classed as endangered, and 25 that grow nowhere else.

• Two reserves declared inside the makhtesh in 1989, expanded in 2009 and 2011
• 486 plant species recorded, 71 rare, 8 endangered, 25 endemic
• 28 Asiatic wild asses released at Ein Saharonim between 1982 and 1987
• 250 to 300 wild asses now in Makhtesh Ramon and Borot Lots
• The Ramon Colors scenic road was built as part of rehabilitating the quarries

The conditions that make this a good place to look at the sky are the same ones that make it a good place to point a satellite at the ground. The US Geological Survey uses the crater floor as a calibration site precisely because it is hyper-arid, gets around 25 millimetres of rain a year, and has rare cloud cover, over a surface with an unusually wide range of mineral compositions in a small area. The German Aerospace Center's Earth Observation Center said much the same in 2022 when its EnMAP hyperspectral mission used the makhtesh for validation, listing sandstone, iron oxide rich rocks, gypsum, limestone, dolomite, clay minerals and crystalline plutonic units within a basin it measured at roughly 40 by 7 kilometres.

In September 2017 the International Dark-Sky Association designated the Ramon Crater Nature Reserve an International Dark Sky Park, the first such designation in the Middle East and, at the time, one of a small number worldwide. The management terms matter more than the label: the western crater is kept as an undisturbed dark core and lighting at the eastern campgrounds is controlled to limit spill.

Night use inside the makhtesh is also managed for the animals, not just the sky. The parks authority is direct about why campers are confined to marked areas: the campgrounds exist to serve visitors and, at the same time, to keep human activity off the crater floor at night, when most of the wildlife is moving. Be'erot, in the centre of the makhtesh, is the campsite with services, reachable by ordinary car, and it supplies water, toilets, light snacks and rubbish removal. The other camping areas in the makhtesh have none of that.