The most popular paid tourist site in Israel, Masada is an UNESCO World Heritage site both for its construction by King Herod, and its famous Jewish resistance to the Romans. It was built as a winter palace between 37 and 31 BC in a dramatic setting, occupying a plateau 60m above sea level, or 490m above the surface of the nearby Dead Sea.
Access to the site is either by the steep and exposed Snake Path that zig zags up the mountainside…
…or by a far more leisurely cable car.
From the top there are epic views over the surreal landscape, with the turquoise Dead Sea in the distance, and incredible rock formations closer by which were formed by the sea when water levels were much higher.
There are plenty of remains of buildings across the site.
King Herod grew up in a Roman world and Masada is typical of a palace of the time with Roman baths.
The king had spectacular three tier terraces built on the northern side where it would be cooler away from direct sunshine.
The black line denotes where the remains were excavated in the 1960s, with everything above them reconstructed. Unusually for an archaeological site almost everything has been evacuated.
Masada was one of the last hold outs of the Roman crushing of the Great Jewish Revolt. It is an understandably difficult place to attack, so the Roman’s used Jewish slaves to built a giant siege ramp, the remains of which are still prominent two thousand years later. Before Masada could be captured though almost all of the thousand Jews there killed themselves to prevent their capture, a symbol of defiance which took on new significant in the twentieth century.
