Mamilla Hotel: A Tony Retreat in Jerusalem

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The lobby of the Mamilla Hotel, Jerusalem. Photo © and courtesy Cookie West

Nearly at the mouth of the Old City’s Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem is the stylish Mamilla Hotel, revamped in the early 2000s by the architect/designer team Moshe Safdie and Piero Lissoni. The hotel’s immediate neighborhood is extremely toney—an interesting contrast to a tumultuous history.

“A rooftop lounge and restaurant offer guests a sweeping view of the Old City.”

The hotel has a very contemporary feel: a massive glass entryway leads into a stunning front lobby, populated with solicitous concierges and well-turned-out guests. The Mamilla’s rooms, modern and angular, are appointed with smart and understated furnishings and subdued lighting, and (fascinatingly) the wall dividing the room from the bath is clear as glass—but at the touch of a button becomes magically opaque. The hotel’s Akasha spa (or “well-being center”) provides a perfect place to soak, swim, and otherwise unwind after a long day of exploring the city. An especially nice touch at the Mamilla is the wall of bookshelves in the glamorous hotel lobby, filled with handsome tomes on the arts and design—in a variety of languages—ranging from the merely tasteful to the downright edgy. The hotel also features several fine eating and drinking spots, including the Mirror Bar, a couple of cafés, and a rooftop lounge and restaurant from which guests can look out over the sweep of the Old City as they enjoy their meal.

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Jerusalem’s Mount Zion Hotel: Ottoman-Style Luxury

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Photo courtesy Mount Zion Hotel

The Mount Zion Hotel, located on the outskirts of Jerusalem’s Old City, offers sumptuousness in a different flavor and an equally intriguing history. Erected by a British charitable organization in the 1880s, the building, which faces Mount Zion and looks over the sweeping Hinnom Valley, originally served as a hospital for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. It was taken over by the Turkish army during World War I and suffered severe damage in the 1920 earthquake. During Israel’s War of Independence, contact with Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter was possible only by means of a cable car running from a point on Mount Zion to a room in this hospital building. The cable car was used at night, carrying medicine and arms up to Mount Zion and the wounded back down to the hospital; by day, the cable was lowered to the ground so as not to be seen by the enemy. As with so many sites in Israel, the past is embedded deeply in every stone here.

“As with so many sites in Israel, the past is embedded deeply in every stone here.”

Today, the Mount Zion Hotel retains much of its Turkish flavor: there is a clear Ottoman-Moroccan aesthetic sensibility in the wildly patterned ceramic floors, stone walls and archways, colorful curtains and bedclothes, and the brightly tiled hamam, now a functioning Turkish bath and part of the hotel’s spa. And the Mount Zion serves one of the loveliest breakfasts in Israel: a groaning board of fruits, cheeses, vegetables, olives, baked goods, fish, omelets, breads, fresh juices. On this account alone, many guests wish they had more days here, in order to sample everything.

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Photos courtesy Mount Zion Hotel

Mizpe Hayamim Hotel and Spa in the Galilee

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Sammy Chazan (left) and an assistant working in the gardens of Mizpe Hayamim in a still from the film  Mizpe Hayamim: A Retreat for Body and Soul

Sammy Chazan and his wife, Anita, are the owners and resident miracle-workers of Mizpe Hayamim, an organic farm, hotel, spa, and more, located in Rosh Pina in the Galilee.

“The Galilee is infamously studded with stones: the line is very clear where Mizpe Hayamim’s vibrantly green farms end and the hard, gray, uncultivated land adjacent begins. ”

Mizpe Hayamim is truly a healing place in all senses. The hotel was the original vision of Erich Jacob Yaroslavsky, known as Doctor Yaros, a German homeopath who moved to Palestine in 1920 and envisioned a beautiful healing center at this spot. Yaros passed away in 1984, but Sammy Chazan has continued and expanded upon many of his ideas.

The thirty-seven acres on which Mizpe Hayamim is located are now cultivated with orchards, flower and herb gardens, and an organic farm and dairy, all of which supply the needs of the hotel’s guests. There are two restaurants (one is vegetarian) as well as a “confectionary” and bakery from which magnificent breads and sweets emerge daily, and a dairy kitchen-laboratory where dozens of types of cheese are made from the milk of Mizpe Hayamim’s goats and cows. The spa, too, uses products derived from the farms and gardens, in the form of floral essences and oils, soaps and tinctures, all with heavenly smells of lavender, jasmine, rose. The rooms and suites of the hotel are elegant and tranquil, looking out into treetops and beyond, as far as Mount Hermon or the shimmering Lake Kinneret.

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Organically grown crops at Mizpe Hayamim in a still from the film  Mizpe Hayamim: A Retreat for Body and Soul.

Guests walk on twisted paths that wind beneath fruiting mulberry trees, through patches of garden overflowing with green spinach and chard, next to barns from which curious sheep crowd to the edge of their pens to peer out. Much of Mizpe Hayamim’s staff is hired from the local Arab and Druze population, who work both in the hotel and on the farm. The land here, though now green and yielding, was by no means always so. The Galilee is infamously studded with stones: the line is very clear where Mizpe Hayamim’s vibrantly green farms end and the hard, gray, uncultivated land adjacent begins. Dr. Yaros toiled for decades here to make this place useable, and his project continues. As Sammy says: “It is a lot of work. It never ends.” But it is unquestionably worth the effort to make possible this remarkable place, where healing seems so feasible, and where, as Sammy puts it, “everything is harmonized.”

The film  Mizpe Hayamim: A Retreat for Body and Soul is available with the purchase of The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today’s Israel.

Mizpe Hayamim Hotel, Spa, Organic Farm >