Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is one of Israel's leading research universities, founded in 1969 with a mission to develop the Negev and the country's south. Named after Israel's founding prime minister, who spent his later years on a kibbutz in the desert and famously believed that the Negev was the country's future, the university has grown into a major institution with nearly 20,000 students.
The campus is pleasant to walk through and the university has a visitor-friendly research institute focused on desert studies. The Be'er Sheva campus helped transform the city from a regional administrative backwater into a genuine urban centre — the student population brought cafes, restaurants, and cultural life that would otherwise not exist here. The university also has a strong chess programme and is one reason for the city's extraordinary density of chess grandmasters.