Tel Aviv offers one of the most architecturally distinctive and historically layered walking routes in the Mediterranean — from the UNESCO-listed Bauhaus White City through its beach promenade to the 4,000-year-old port of Jaffa. This tel aviv walking tour by the Walking Around Israel channel moves from Old Jaffa back through Tel Aviv’s coastline in 4K UHD, combining the ancient port city that was already old when the Phoenicians were sailing it with the modernist dream city built on the dunes beside it in the 20th century, and the beach culture that connects them both.

About This Walking Tour

Walking Around Israel’s 4K UHD tour begins in Old Jaffa — the ancient hillside port from which the city of Tel Aviv takes much of its founding mythology — and moves northward along the coastline into the modern city. Old Jaffa (Yafo in Hebrew) sits on a promontory above the Mediterranean, its narrow stone lanes, art galleries converted from Ottoman-era buildings, and the famous Jaffa Flea Market providing a very different atmosphere from the sleek modernism that awaits a few kilometres up the coast.

The tour captures the Ottoman clock tower at the entrance to Old Jaffa — built in 1906 to mark the 25th anniversary of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s reign, one of eight such towers erected across the Ottoman Empire in that year — and the ancient port itself, where a natural rocky harbour has been in continuous use since at least 1800 BC. The video then follows the waterfront north into the Neve Tzedek neighbourhood, the first Jewish quarter built outside the walls of Jaffa in 1887, whose low Ottoman-era lane houses and boutique character provide a transition between ancient Jaffa and the White City proper.

The Bauhaus architecture of Rothschild Boulevard and the surrounding White City streets comes into full focus in the middle section of the walk: the characteristic curved balconies, horizontal strip windows, pilotis (ground-floor columns that lift buildings off the ground), and flat roofs of the International Style rendered in the local plaster that gives the buildings their cream-white appearance. The beach promenade between Gordon Beach and the marina provides the natural conclusion, where Mediterranean light falls on an outdoor culture that is entirely its own.

Highlights of Tel Aviv

The White City contains over 4,000 buildings in the Bauhaus or International Style, making Tel Aviv’s concentration of Modernist architecture the largest in the world. The buildings were designed almost exclusively by Jewish architects who had studied at the Bauhaus school in Germany and fled Nazi persecution in the 1930s, bringing the principles of European Modernism to British Mandate Palestine. UNESCO inscribed the White City in 2003, recognising it as an outstanding example of the new town planning and architecture of the early 20th century.

Rothschild Boulevard is the most celebrated address in the White City — a wide tree-lined avenue where the density of significant Bauhaus buildings is highest, and where the ground floors of historic buildings now contain cafés, restaurants, and offices. Dizengoff Square, a circular plaza designed as a traffic roundabout, was the social centre of early Tel Aviv and retains its Fire and Water Fountain as a gathering point.

Carmel Market (HaCarmel) is Tel Aviv’s largest open-air market and arguably its most social institution: a densely packed corridor of stalls selling fresh produce, hummus, falafel, fresh juice, spices, cheap clothing, and kitchen equipment, where the noise and density of Israeli urban life is experienced at its most concentrated. Old Jaffa’s Flea Market (Shuk HaPishpishim) offers a completely different atmosphere — antiques, Persian carpets, vintage furniture, and the kind of finds that require patience and an eye for quality.

A Brief History of Tel Aviv and Jaffa

Jaffa is among the oldest continuously inhabited ports in the world, with evidence of settlement and harbour use dating to approximately 1800 BC. It appears in Ancient Egyptian records, in the Hebrew Bible (as the port from which the prophet Jonah sailed), in the letters of the Crusader kings, and in the accounts of Napoleonic campaigns. By the late Ottoman period it was a significant regional city with a mixed Arab and Jewish population.

Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 as a planned residential neighbourhood of Jaffa on the sand dunes north of the old city — its name, meaning “Hill of Spring,” was taken from the Hebrew translation of Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland. As Jewish immigration to Palestine accelerated through the 1920s and 1930s, particularly as refugees from Nazi Germany arrived carrying the Bauhaus design principles they had been trained in, Tel Aviv grew rapidly and was declared an independent city in 1934. The confluence of European Modernist ideology and Mediterranean climate produced the White City’s particular character: buildings designed to maximise ventilation and shade in a hot coastal environment using the formal vocabulary of European avant-garde architecture.

Practical Tips

Ben Gurion International Airport is approximately 20 kilometres from central Tel Aviv; the airport train connects to the city in around 30 minutes. Tel Aviv’s Light Rail and bus network covers the urban area, but the walking route from Jaffa to the White City along the coast is around 5 kilometres and is one of the best urban walks in the region. The beach promenade is open and well-lit at all hours.

The currency is the Israeli new shekel. Hebrew and Arabic are the official languages; English is very widely spoken. The best seasons for visiting are March to May and October to November, when temperatures are pleasant for outdoor walking; beach season runs June through September and the city’s café and outdoor culture reaches its peak. Shakshuka — eggs poached in a spiced tomato sauce — is the definitive Tel Aviv breakfast dish; the restaurant Dr Shakshuka in Jaffa claims the legendary original version. Friday afternoon brings the start of Shabbat, when many businesses close; the beach and restaurants in non-religious neighbourhoods remain open.

Watch & Explore More

For more Middle East walking destinations, explore @walkingtoursvideoscom on YouTube. Our Jerusalem walking tour covers the four quarters of the Old City just an hour inland, and the Amman walking tour explores Jordan’s capital from Rainbow Street to the ancient Citadel hill.