Hamat Gader

The operator's springs page counts five springs at Hamat Gader: four mineral and rich in sulphur, one fresh. The Hebrew Wikipedia article, which carries the fullest published account of the hydrology, names them and gives their temperatures, and the useful point for a visitor is that the hottest is not the one they will be sitting in. Ein el-Maqla, also called the frying pan, reaches 52 degrees and fed the Roman bathhouse; the modern pools are filled from Ein Balzam, the spring of perfume, cooler at 40.6 to 42 degrees and far higher yielding at 500 to 700 cubic metres an hour.

The heat is not volcanic. These are fault springs, breaking out along a secondary fracture of the Yarmouk within the Jordan Rift, and the water is thought to rise from an estimated depth of two kilometres or more, where the rock is simply hot. The same mechanism feeds Hammat Tiberias up the lake.

Beyond heat and minerals the Hebrew account adds a property the operator does not mention: measurable radioactivity, from isotopes of radium and radon dissolved out of uranium in the rock at depth. The health claims on the operator's pages are the operator's own. Its practical advice is firmer: bathing is not for people with heart conditions or blood pressure problems, for pregnant women or for those recovering from a stroke, and a doctor should be consulted first.

• Ein el-Maqla (Hamat Gader 1): up to 52°C, the hottest, used by the Roman baths
• Ein Balzam or Ein el-Jarab (Hamat Gader 2): 40.6 to 42°C, 500 to 700 cubic metres an hour, fills the modern pools
• Ein e-Rih (Hamat Gader 3): about 37°C, closed to visitors, with an Ottoman bathhouse over it
• Ein Sakhna (Hamat Gader 4): about 28°C, used for fish ponds
• Ein Bulus: about 25°C, fresh water, for drinking

Construction began in the second century CE under the Tenth Legion, garrisoned at Gadara, the Decapolis city on the ridge four kilometres away at what is now Umm Qais in Jordan. An inscription at the site names the emperor Antoninus Pius, who reigned from 138 to 161. The Israeli Foreign Ministry's account is clear that the baths only became popular later, in the Byzantine period of the fifth and sixth centuries.

The plan is legible on the ground. The Foreign Ministry puts the complex at over 500 square metres, reached from the north by a paved street twelve metres wide. Each pool sat in its own hall, and the halls were linked so that a bather could work gradually towards the hottest water. The marble fountains that ringed the long cool pool were all found broken and defaced, which the excavators read as the work of iconoclasts.

The writing is why the place is quoted so often. Dozens of Greek inscriptions and some in Arabic were set into the floors and walls. Eudocia's poem, on a marble slab 1.81 by 0.71 metres, praises the spring it calls Clibanus and enumerates sixteen parts of the complex, fourteen of them named: from Hygieia, the pagan goddess of health, to holy Elijah, a nun and a patriarch. Pagan and Christian in the same list, on the same wall, in the fifth century.

The second famous text is Umayyad, set in the same hall, recording repairs made under the caliph Mu'awiya by order of the local governor: Hebrew Wikipedia dates it to 5 December 662, the English article gives the restoration as 663. Antoninus of Placentia, a pilgrim who came in 570, described a pool for lepers that the excavators later matched on the ground. By the tenth century al-Muqaddasi was writing in the past tense: the people of Tiberias, he reported, say the waters were once surrounded by buildings, each one for a particular disease.

The first excavation was not of the baths. In 1932 Eleazar Sukenik dug the synagogue on the mound south of them: an almost square hall, 13.90 by 13 metres, facing Jerusalem, with an apse in the southern wall and a raised bema before it. Its mosaic floor carried geometric and floral carpets, the one in front of the bema flanked by two cypresses and two lions around a wreathed dedication ending: 'May the King of the Universe bestow the blessing upon their work. Amen. Amen. Selah.' The date is not settled: the Foreign Ministry puts the building in the fifth or sixth century, the English Wikipedia article in the fifth and the Hebrew article in the fourth. The best of that floor is not here in any case; its restored upper section is installed in the entrance hall of the Supreme Court in Jerusalem.

Excavation of the bath complex itself began in 1979, under Yizhar Hirschfeld and Giora Solar for the Hebrew University, the Israel Exploration Society and the antiquities authority, and ran seven seasons. Hirschfeld's own view was that more is still buried, including the main entrance gate. The Foreign Ministry's account says the exposed structures were restored and opened to visitors; the operator's current website does not describe them, publish hours for them or price them separately, so what is walkable on any given day is worth confirming at the ticket office.

Digging has continued in a smaller way: in 2001 Moshe Hartal excavated 400 square metres east of the hot pool of 'Ein el-Jarab for the Israel Antiquities Authority and found four strata running from the fourth century to a complex destroyed in the earthquake of 1033, which he read as dressing or massage rooms. Two later bathhouses close the sequence and neither is in use: the Ottoman hammam in basalt over Ein e-Rih, now roofless and closed, and an unfinished twentieth-century one abandoned in the scrub nearby.

• Ancient and standing: the bath halls, their pools and the stone and lead water system, excavated from 1979 and preserved in places to a height of several metres
• Ancient and excavated, on the mound: the synagogue plan, its apse and bema
• Ancient but not here: the best of the synagogue mosaic, restored and installed at the Supreme Court in Jerusalem
• Ottoman and ruined: the basalt hammam over Ein e-Rih, closed
• Twentieth century and abandoned: the unfinished modern bathhouse in the scrub
• Wholly modern: every pool a visitor actually bathes in, the crocodile farm, the hotel, the restaurants and the car park

Before 1949 the springs belonged to al-Hamma, a Palestinian Arab village on a narrow salient in the Yarmouk valley with Syria to the north and Transjordan to the south and east. It had a railway: the Jezreel Valley line opened in 1905, running from Haifa via Samakh and al-Hamma to the Hejaz Railway at Dera'a, and the station building still stands, with bridges over the Yarmouk and short tunnels visible from the road east. Who redeveloped the springs under the Mandate is recorded two ways: a Lebanese businessman, Sulayman Nasif, granted a concession in 1936 in the English account, and Suleiman Nadif Bey leasing the land in the 1920s in the Hebrew one.

On the night of 16 to 17 June 1946 the Palmach blew up eleven bridges across the country. One was the al-Hamma bridge over the Yarmouk, 130 metres long and then the longest in the land. It was never rebuilt.

Under the 1949 armistice the valley fell inside the demilitarised zone between Israel and Syria, and the demilitarisation clause was worded vaguely enough for both sides to read it their own way. Article V formally protected the villagers and their property, but Israel wanted the area's 2,200 Palestinian inhabitants moved to Syria, and Walid Khalidi's account has them driven out over the following years. On 4 April 1951 Israel sent a two-vehicle patrol, its soldiers dressed as policemen because troops were not permitted in the zone, to assert sovereignty. The Syrians opened fire and seven Israeli soldiers were killed.

Israel took the area in the Six-Day War in 1967 and work began on new baths, but the border stayed live. On 2 May 1969 two squads crossed the Yarmouk from Jordan before dawn, fought the Golani company holding the position and destroyed the newly completed bathhouse with explosives. The resort finally opened in July 1977, years late, set up by three kibbutzim of the southern Golan: Mevo Hama, Kfar Haruv and Afik. Its first manager, from 1976 to 1979, was Pamela Trenter of Mevo Hama, who had come from Britain with a Habonim group during the Yom Kippur War. Kibbutz Metzar joined later, and on the Hebrew account all four were running the place as of 2017, across roughly 150 dunams.

The farm dates from 1981, when members of Kibbutz Mevo Hama added a tourist crocodile farm to the springs. It began with a few dozen American alligators brought from Florida. Nile crocodiles from Africa and caimans from South America followed, and in 1996 two more species arrived from India, the gharial and the saltwater crocodile.

How many animals are there now is a question with three published answers and no way for a visitor to settle it. The operator's own page says the farm held about 80 crocodilians in 2007 and holds about 40 today, of three kinds. The Hebrew Wikipedia article says about 120 and calls it the largest crocodilian farm in the Middle East. The English article says about 200, and flags that sentence as unsourced.

The layout is a set of fenced pools, separated by species with some mixed, and a walkway over the top from which the animals are watched at a distance. The alligators have the largest pool, with a shaded terrace above it and talks in Hebrew and English. Feeding runs from May to November. Through the winter the animals slow their metabolism and are not fed at all, so a January visit is a visit to a yard of motionless reptiles. The farm also keeps shorter hours than the park, Monday to Saturday from 9am to 4pm.

At the centre is the natural thermo-mineral pool, welling up year round. From the source the water runs into a covered area where submerged jacuzzi beds are built around a central pillar, then into the large open pool, with water cannons aimed at the neck and shoulders, jacuzzi points along the wall and a bubble lake. The Splash is the counterweight: a cold fresh-water pool with a ten-metre spiral slide, open in season and restricted to ages ten and over.

Admission runs on three tiers by day of the week, cheapest Monday to Wednesday and dearest on Friday, festivals and the intermediate days of festivals, with concessions for senior citizens, disabled visitors and soldiers on production of a card. Children up to one metre tall enter free. Parking is free, and the park is closed on Sundays.

Two things beyond the pools carry their own conditions. Spa Village, a boutique hotel of 31 suites opened in 2001, has its own pools, jacuzzis, saunas and treatment rooms, and its day packages are priced separately; the Hebrew price list restricts it to adults from 18, the older English page says 16, so confirm which applies before booking for a teenager. The tent village is the cheap way to stay, with air-conditioned tents for up to five people and mattresses but no bedding.

One recent episode explains the signage about water standards. In November 2005 and again in April 2006 the health ministry's northern district physician ordered the baths shut after testing the water. The operator went to the magistrates' court in Nazareth and argued that the standard for a thermo-mineral site is the one for sea bathing beaches, not the one for fresh-water pools. The court accepted that both times.