Caesarea National Park

Caesarea is large enough to disorient you: a Roman city in near-continuous use for two millennia, with the sea on one side and a modern town on the other, and the ruins spread across a coastal plain that gives you no sense of the walls and towers that once made this one of the most fortified harbours in the eastern Mediterranean.

The theatre is the most immediately striking structure. Carved into the sand dunes above the sea with an orchestra of white stone that can still seat 4,000, it faces the sea with a stage platform that would not look out of place in a Roman provincial city anywhere in the empire. The acoustics are remarkable — performers have staged opera here in recent years and the sound carries without amplification to the top row.

The Roman aqueduct ran sixteen kilometres from the foothills of Mount Carmel to supply the city with fresh water, and two channels of it still stand in the park: the earlier single-channel system and the later twin-channel parallel aqueduct that supplied the larger population of the fully developed city. To walk along the channels is to understand the scale of the infrastructure that Herod was willing to build to make this city function.

The harbour itself was Herods greatest engineering gamble: he built a concrete breakwater across the natural bay using underwater foundations sunk in caissons, an engineering technique borrowed from the Romans that created an artificial harbour described by Josephus as equal to Athens and Alexandria in grandeur. The breakwater ruins are still visible at low tide, blackened by two millennia of seawater.

The Crusader city that grew up inside the Roman walls is less well preserved but its outline is legible, and the medieval cathedral and the crypt of the good Corsairs are worth the walk north of the main site.

The hippodrome, where chariot races were held for a Roman population that had adopted the entertainments of the empire with enthusiasm, is now largely submerged or covered by the modern coastal road, but its outline can still be traced in the landscape to the south of the theatre.

What is most remarkable about Caesarea is not any single ruin but the layering: standing on the roof of the restored theatre you can see the Roman harbour works, the Crusader walls, the Ottoman mosque that was converted from a church, and the modern town of Caesarea Maritima behind it all. Two thousand years of history in one view.

Caesarea contains one of the best-preserved Roman theatres in the eastern Mediterranean, still used for performances and directly facing the sea.

The harbour engineering was genuinely innovative — Herods breakwater was among the first large-scale uses of underwater concrete in the ancient world and the harbour it created was a trading hub for centuries.

The site layers Jewish, Roman, Byzantine and Crusader history in one compact coastal location, making it a compact overview of the sweep of Levantine history.