Rosh Hanikra

I drove to Rosh Hanikra almost as an afterthought, tacked onto the end of a trip up the coast from Haifa, expecting a scenic viewpoint and not much else. Instead I found one of the strangest, most photogenic corners of the entire country — a place where geology, politics, and a slightly rickety cable car all collide within a few hundred meters of each other.

The cliffs themselves are white chalk, the same limestone that runs underground for kilometers along this stretch of coast, and the sea has spent two million years hollowing them into caves and arches at the waterline. The cable car down to the grottoes is short but almost vertiginous — a steep drop over turquoise water that looked, from above, more Aegean than Levantine. At the bottom, wooden walkways wind through the caverns themselves, where the water changes color from teal to something closer to ink depending on the light and the swell, and the sound of waves compressing through narrow rock channels booms in a way that’s oddly percussive, almost musical.

What makes the place stick with you, though, is what sits directly above the grottoes: the border with Lebanon, marked by a fence a short walk from the cable car station, with a defunct rail tunnel nearby that once connected Haifa to Beirut before 1948. Standing there, looking north at hills that are technically another country and a life I couldn’t access, gave the whole visit an edge that the postcard views don’t quite prepare you for. It’s a strange sensation, standing somewhere so beautiful and so charged at the same time.

There’s also a small multimedia presentation inside about the old railway, and a surprisingly good little snack kiosk at the top where I ate hummus and watched a group of Israeli schoolkids on a field trip shriek their way down the cable car, entirely unbothered by the fifteen-story drop beneath them.

When to go: Late spring through early autumn gives the calmest seas and the clearest water inside the grottoes — winter storms can close the caves entirely when swells get too rough, so check ahead if you’re visiting between November and February.