Jerusalem |
|
|
|
Jerusalem is the capital and largest city of the State of Israel. The city has a history that goes back to the 4th millennium BC, making it one of the oldest cities in the world. The City of Gold is a fascinatingly unique place where the first century rubs shoulders with the twenty-first century, each jostling for legitimacy and space. The Old City and its Walls form a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This tiny ancient city is home to holy sites for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and is truly breathtaking. West Jerusalem is the secular Israeli part of Jerusalem, also known as New Jerusalem, and is the modern commercial heart of the city, having become the focus for development in the capital from the time of Israeli independence in 1948 to the reunification of the city with the Six Day War in 1967. East Jerusalem is the Eastern side of Jerusalem, home to most of the Arab population. The whole of Jerusalem is surrounded by valleys and dry riverbeds. In biblical times, Jerusalem was surrounded by forests of almond, olive and pine trees. Over centuries of warfare and neglect, these forests were destroyed. Farmers in the Jerusalem region thus built stone terraces along the slopes to hold back the soil, a feature still very much in evidence in the Jerusalem landscape. Water supply has always been a major problem in Jerusalem, as attested to by the intricate network of ancient aqueducts, tunnels, pools and cisterns found in the city. Jerusalem is a short distance from the Dead Sea, the lowest body of water on Earth.
This article is based on work found at WikiTravel. A list of contributors is available a the original article. This article is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 license.
|
|
