A visit to Gamla

Yesterday, I had some free time in the middle of the day, so we decided to take another trip to the Golan. We went to the Gamla Nature Reserve, which we had tried to go to once before, but it had been too late in the day, and it had been closed.

This national park is important for several reasons. First, there is the natural beauty. Three streams flow together in this area, and each has cut a canyon. The most impressive is Nakhal Gamla, a view of which you can see in the first photo. Several species of birds of prey and scavengers make their nests in the steep walls here. Perhaps the most important is an endangered species of vultures. Two thirds of the remaining individuals in the entire country live in this canyon! Up at the head of this canyon (probably near the clump of trees you can see) is the tallest waterfalls in Israel (which we didn't go over to see this time).

Also, although this is December and hardly the beginning of Spring yet, there were several flowers already blooming. The third picture is a close-up of a lovely blossom on a tree (probably a שקדיה "shkediah" almond tree).

In addition to its natural wonders, this park is also of great historical and archeological importance. In the second picture, you can see a bit of the ancient city of Gamla, which flourished from Hellenistic times until 67 C.E., when the Romans destroyed it. This city is known both from the Talmud and Josephus, who lived there at one time and who wrote about the battles. After its destruction by the Romans, it was never rebuilt, and its location was not known in modern times until it was discovered again in 1968! Its name, גמלא Gamla (which is probably Aramaic), by the way, comes from the Hebrew (and probably also Aramaic) word גמל gamal, which means "camel" (and from which we no doubt get our English word for this animal!), and this is due to the fact that the hill on which it sat looks somethings like the humps on a camel. If you look closely in this picture, you can see some of the ruins of a building in the city, some of the wall built to keep the Romans out, and, in the upper right, the northern end of the Kinneret (the "Sea of Galilee"), where the Jordan River flows into it.