A city rebuilt at least twice
Jerusalem's Old City — the walled square kilometer that holds nearly every stop on this itinerary — is not the original city. The oldest settlement, the City of David, sits on a narrow ridge just outside today's walls, on the slope running down toward the Kidron Valley. Archaeologists have traced continuous occupation there back roughly 3,000 years, to the era the Hebrew Bible describes as David's capital. The walls a visitor sees today, including the ones framing Jaffa Gate and the Tower of David, date largely from the 16th century, built by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent — themselves raised over Herodian, Roman, Byzantine, Crusader and Mamluk foundations layered on top of each other. Walking from the City of David up into the Old City is, in a literal sense, walking forward through the city's various rebuildings.
Four quarters, one square kilometer
The Old City has been informally divided into Christian, Muslim, Armenian and Jewish Quarters since at least the Ottoman period, though the boundaries were never official and shifted repeatedly with each ruling power. The Armenian Quarter, the smallest of the four, is centered on St. James Cathedral and has kept a distinct Armenian Christian community since the fourth century, among the oldest continuous Armenian communities anywhere. The Jewish Quarter, largely rebuilt after 1967 following damage sustained in 1948, sits closest to the Western Wall. Walking between quarters — as Day 1 of this itinerary does, from the Christian Quarter's Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Jewish Quarter's Western Wall — covers only a few hundred meters but crosses centuries of separately governed history.
A hill named for a king who never built there
Mount Zion, just outside the Old City's Zion Gate, illustrates how layered the city's traditions are. The site venerated as King David's Tomb has been a pilgrimage destination since at least the ninth century, though historians and archaeologists — and the Jewish religious authorities who administer the site — do not consider it David's actual burial place; the historical City of David lies on the opposite side of the Old City. One floor above the tomb sits the Cenacle, the traditional Room of the Last Supper, later used as a mosque under Ottoman rule and still carrying a mihrab on its wall today. A single small building has served three religious traditions across roughly a thousand years without ever losing any of them.
The 20th century's second city
Most of what is now called West Jerusalem — the neighborhoods around Mamilla, the German Colony, and the Mahane Yehuda market — was built from the mid-1800s onward as Jerusalem outgrew its walls for the first time since antiquity. Mishkenot Sha'ananim, founded in 1860 just west of the Old City, is generally credited as the first Jewish neighborhood built outside the walls; Mamilla, now the pedestrian shopping street steps from Jaffa Gate, developed nearby in the following decades as a mixed commercial district. Mount Herzl and the national institutions clustered around Givat Ram — the Israel Museum, the Knesset — belong to a still later chapter, built after 1948 as the newly declared State of Israel established a capital.
Sacred geography, close together
What strikes most first-time visitors is not any single site but the compression: the Western Wall, the holiest site accessible to Jewish prayer, sits a few hundred meters from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Christianity's traditional site of crucifixion and burial, which sits a similar distance from the Dome of the Rock, from which Islamic tradition holds the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. From the Mount of Olives across the Kidron Valley, all three are visible in a single sweep of the skyline — which is exactly why this itinerary opens Day 2 there.