The gate of Eden: In Israel’s Valley of Springs, ancient history offers a new journey of healing

More than 1,700 years ago, the Talmudic sage Reish Lakish looked out over the Beit She’an basin and left a line the valley still lives by: “If the Garden of Eden is in the Land of Israel, its gate is Beit She’an.”

We came to see for ourselves, as a family, with our two boys: two nights, and a valley that seems to be made mostly of water.

Emek Hama’ayanot, the Valley of Springs, lies beneath the ridge of Mount Gilboa, inside the long scar of the Syrian-African Rift. About 40 natural springs rise here from deep underground, holding steady between 24 and 28 degrees Celsius in every season. Water is the reason people came, and the reason they stayed.

Under the Greeks and Romans, Beit She’an became Scythopolis, the leading city of the Decapolis, a league of 10 Greco-Roman cities, and the only one of them west of the Jordan River. Its builders turned spring water into public fountains, cascading staircases, and great heated baths. Long before anyone coined the phrase “wellness tourism,” this valley was practicing it.

What we found 2,000 years later is a region still in the business of healing: fish ponds returned to wetland, kitchens reopened by reservists home from war, and a holiday village that uses running water to quiet the world.

A village built to slow you down

Our base for both nights was Kama Resort, and it shaped everything that followed.

Its founder, Khen Shalem, never planned to be a hotelier. Trained as a physicist, he moved into filmmaking and won a Student Emmy Award for his short film Abe. After securing the film rights to Meir Shalev’s bestselling A Russian Novel (Roman Rusi), he realized that independent cinema in Israel would not pay its own way. Kama was meant to be a quiet business that would fund the screenplay.

Then the place took hold of him. Today, he says that even with a large budget in hand, he would put every resource back into Kama rather than return to a film set.

Shalem grew up on nearby Kibbutz Nir David, and Kama feels like a memory of that childhood. At its center is a wide green lawn in the spirit of the old kibbutz commons, framed by an avenue of trees. Every unit faces inward, toward the grass, the reflection pools, and the shallow wading pool. He kept the creative work in the valley. Architects Hava Pasder and Ami Dvir, of the firm Artista, drew the plans. Lilach Lempel designed the interiors. Visual artist Dana Stempler Asael photographed the rooms.

The valley is working farmland, and tractors start early. Instead of building walls, Shalem turned to the memory of his father, an archaeologist who studied the Roman water systems of this region and who passed away when Shalem was a boy. A stone aqueduct now runs across the grounds and spills into a waterfall over the wading pool. Its steady rush covers the sound of farm machinery and settles over the whole village like white noise.

The suites are unlike anything else in the valley: rounded vaults modeled on arched aircraft hangars, built with curved-steel Quonset engineering. To get them right, Shalem found Rami, an Israel Air Force veteran who spent his military career building these exact hangars. Inside, the ceiling curves overhead without a single hard angle, and the effect is one of shelter.

Each suite has 42 sq.m. of insulated living space and an 18-sq.m. private terrace. It sleeps up to six, with a double bed and two to four singles, a large bathroom with a walk-in shower, and a kitchenette with a refrigerator, microwave, and espresso machine. There are no televisions, by design. The idea is that you step outside and listen to the valley instead.

Even the safe rooms tell a story. Israeli law requires a fortified room, a mamad, and Shalem shaped Kama’s to echo the 1930s Tower and Stockade (Homa U’migdal) settlements, a nod to the nearby historical outposts of Tel Hashlosha and Migdal George.

Kama Resort has 23 units today, with zoning approval for up to 250. Its lawn can hold corporate retreats of 250 people and gatherings of up to 600. Many guests book their next stay before they check out. From here, the valley’s springs, nature reserves, ruins, and restaurants are all minutes away, and Kama guests receive benefits at leading local restaurants and attractions.

Dawn with the flock

Spring and summer in the valley set their own hours. If you want to be outside, you go at dawn.

At 6 a.m., with the sun rising crimson and gold over the mountains of Jordan, we arrived at Havat Nokdey Ruppin, known across the valley as Dir Balak, on the edge of Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin. Ile Shevach, with a background as an emotional therapist, runs the farm with her husband, Tsachi, its master cheesemaker. They built it as an educational farm as much as an agricultural one. The kibbutz children who work here, known as the “Dirnikim,” care for the young goats, handle daily chores, and set much of the barn’s rhythm.

We walked out to pasture with the herd, some 40 mothers and kids, and our two sons found their places on their own.

Eitam, seven, took the front. With a rough wooden staff in hand, he led the herd forward, steering it through body language, low calls, and small shifts in position. His small frame was a silhouette against the rising sun, and the flock moved with his steps. Lavie, 10, took the rear, and the farm’s puppies with it. He watched the ground, kept the pups watered as the heat climbed, and carried them when the desert thorns cut their paws.

Walking beside us, Shevach said that shepherding was humanity’s first school of leadership and responsibility. Animals read the person guiding them instantly: the anxiety, the hesitation, the calm. For a child to earn that trust from a flock, and to show that kind of care on rough ground, is a lesson no classroom can teach. Watching our boys that morning, I understood exactly what she meant.

The farm’s coffee truck was waiting when we came back: excellent espresso, warm, flaky pastries, and cheese made on site from the milk of the goats we had just walked across the fields. It was sharp and clean, with a trace of the wild herbs the herd grazes each morning. Animal, land and table, with nothing in between.

Water finding its way home

Our guide to the valley’s wild eastern edge, along the Jordanian border, was Chen Ravon Sherry, a ranger with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). Her field is rewilding, a conservation approach that pulls back from heavy human intervention and lets natural processes repair damaged ecosystems on their own terms. By the end of our trip, her way of seeing had become the thread running through everything we experienced.

For decades, commercial fish ponds dominated this landscape. They broke up migration routes and disrupted the native springs. Under the Startup Nature campaign, Chen and the SPNI are reversing that, one careful step at a time. They clear old blockages and use gravity and the land’s natural slope to send spring water back into abandoned ponds. The result is a growing chain of wetlands that eventually returns clean water to the Jordan River.

The land has answered. Thick walls of reeds, sweet cane, and native plants have reclaimed the banks. Songbirds fill the air, and native fish move through water that feels untouched.

Along the border fence, the quiet is so complete that the loudest sounds are a fish breaking the surface and the wind in the reeds. That stillness has drawn combat veterans, civilians carrying the invisible wounds of war, and people living with severe PTSD. Many come to volunteer alongside the SPNI rangers, clearing stream paths, tracking wildlife, and checking water levels. It is slow, repetitive work under an open sky. With no sudden city noise and the constant presence of running water, frayed nervous systems slowly settle.

Winter transforms these ponds again. The valley sits on the great migration corridor linking Europe, Asia, and Africa, and ranks as the second most important bird-watching destination in Israel. Thousands of great white pelicans land here in tight formation, alongside black storks, glossy ibises, herons, and raptors riding the thermals off Mount Gilboa. Picture a January morning at the edge of a border pond, pelicans feeding in unison beneath the desert mountains. That is our next reporting trip.

The valley at the table

A landscape can’t fully restore you unless it feeds you too. Every table we sat at in this valley told a story of return: to the soil, home from the front lines, or straight into ancient stone.

Meshek Eliyahu, Moshav Beit Yosef: Our culinary journey began at this family-run farm restaurant, where chef Eliran Ishran cooks farm-to-table in the truest sense. For more than a decade, the family worked at the top of Israel’s competitive restaurant scene. When the war broke out, many of them were called up for months of reserve duty on the front lines, and came home wanting what mattered most: family, soil, and honest cooking.

The kitchen buys directly from valley farmers and has no fixed menu. Each day is built around what was harvested that morning from their own plots and neighboring farms. We ate charred root vegetables with raw tahini and local honey, crisp field greens, and slow-baked bread made from heirloom grains. Every plate felt alive.

Artichoke, at the foot of Mount Gilboa: Where the mountain meets the valley floor, Artichoke puts regional farming at the center of the plate. Artichokes, beets, and fresh herbs are the stars, cooked with real creativity. Children and adults can step off the patio straight into the fields and walk among the rows of crops, while the sheer cliffs of the Gilboa rise behind the tables. Readers who show this article receive a special discount through Yaniv.

Zoara Distillery (Jordan Spirits): Zoara was founded to solve an agricultural problem. Valley packing houses reject millions of kilograms of good dates every year for cosmetic flaws alone. Zoara rescues them, ferments and distills them into a clean, high-proof base, and then turns to the land for flavor: Mount Gilboa pine needles, local ashwagandha, mint, and lemon verbena. Its lineup revives the heirloom Yosef Effendi mandarin, which took silver at the 2024 London Spirits Competition, alongside a bright mulberry gin and Arak Mansour, aged three years in oak barrels in the valley heat. A glass here sums up Emek Hama’ayanot: taking what was discarded or scarred and making it whole again.

Dinner among the ruins

In Beit She’an’s old city, history isn’t behind glass. You eat beside it, and sometimes inside it.

Even Harosha: This wine bar and meat bistro carries one of the valley’s great stories of resilience. Its founder, Shimon Oshri, a retired IDF commander, spent most of his career leading elite units, including the Duvdevan unit. After leaving the army, he bought an old, grease-stained garage along the historical market streets, planning to turn it into a fine bistro.

His first day of construction was set for October 8, 2023. Instead, he went straight back into uniform and spent months commanding troops on the southern front. When he finally came home, he poured himself into finishing the space. He named it for the keystone that locks an arch together and dedicated it to his late mother, a beloved local kindergarten teacher for 42 years.

The setting is extraordinary. The dining room sits inside the moat that Crusader knights cut some 900 years ago to protect their fortress. Its walls are the original hand-cut basalt and limestone arches, softened by sleek industrial steel. The kitchen pairs premium meats with regional wines, but the dish already entering local lore is Shimon’s Schnitzel: huge, golden, wafer-thin, with an unbelievable crunch. It is comfort food raised to an art, and best eaten with a glass of crisp local wine.

Helena: For lunch, Helena gives the most honest taste of the town. It has the bustle of a beloved workers’ lunch spot, and it treats its food with real pride. Helena backs onto the ancient stone of the old quarter, steps from a 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheater where, in the golden age of Scythopolis, gladiators fought lions. The moment you sit down, the table fills with house-made salads, bright pickles, smoky grilled eggplant, and fiery chili sauces, followed by thin, crisp schnitzels and tender grilled meats. Fast, generous, and done with care, it’s easy to see why locals line up every afternoon.

That amphitheater has never been excavated. The region holds so much history that the Israel Antiquities Authority has left it as it is, wild and silent under the brush. To trace the stone gates where fighters and lions once entered the arena, from your seat at a lunch table, is an experience no museum can offer.

Basilia: For dinner, we went to Basilia, an upscale dairy and Italian restaurant. The kitchen works closely with local growers, so the menu shifts with the valley’s harvests: pasta rolled by hand each day, wood-fired pizzas with blistered, airy crusts, and garden salads built around artisanal valley cheeses. The service is warm, but the real magic is on the open terrace, where the night breeze moves through wheat fields that stretch into the dark. Here, fine dining and fertile earth share the same breath.

The city beneath the city

Early one morning, before the gates opened to the public, we walked Beit She’an National Park with its longtime director, Nissim Bados. He has spent about 40 years excavating and preserving this site. He first arrived in 1986 as a young student, when a large government project brought 450 local workers to the dig to fight unemployment in the region.

Few cities on earth, Nissim told us, can match Beit She’an’s unbroken record: nearly 7,000 years of continuous settlement, with 20 layers of civilization stacked on the central tel alone, from the Chalcolithic through the Canaanite, Egyptian, and Persian eras. The valley’s soil was so fertile it was said to yield seventy times the seed sown.

Under the Greeks and Romans, the city was reborn as Scythopolis, named, as Nissim tells it, for Scythian horsemen from the cold steppes who settled here for the water despite the summer heat. It became the capital of the Decapolis and a crossroads between the Mediterranean and the East. As we walked the great stone avenues of the Cardo and the Decumanus, Nissim pointed to the spot where his team found 32 perfectly preserved gold coins buried beneath fallen columns.

The whole city was built as a celebration of water. Stone aqueducts carried millions of cubic meters from the valley’s springs into public fountains and down monumental staircases. The western bathhouse alone spread over more than seven dunams, warmed by a hypocaust heating system beneath the floors. Wellness, it turns out, was always a pillar of civilization here.

Scythopolis also feels unusually real. Its Roman theater, with remarkable acoustics, is more than 90% original stone, unlike the heavily reconstructed ruins at Caesarea. And what visitors see today, Nissim explained, is only 7%-8% of the ancient city’s 1,700 dunams. The rest lies under the valley floor, frozen as it stood on January 18, 749 CE, when an earthquake leveled the city in seconds. There is enough buried city left, he says, for another 90 years of digging.

Standing in that empty theater as the morning light climbed the stone, I thought back to Chen’s ponds, to water slowly finding its way home to the Jordan. Reish Lakish called this valley the gate of Eden. Two thousand years on, the springs are still running, and the valley is still restoring the people who walk through it.

The writer is a travel photojournalist mapping Israel’s natural landscapes at the intersection of wellness, healing hospitality, and sustainable tourism. He was a guest of the places mentioned.