Nazareth is the largest Arab city in Israel, home to around 80,000 people — mostly Muslim and Christian — and one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Christianity. The Basilica of the Annunciation, a striking 1960s church built over the grotto where the angel Gabriel is said to have appeared to Mary, dominates the old town. Beneath it lie the remains of earlier churches going back to the Byzantine period. Adjacent to it, St Joseph's Church marks the traditional site of Joseph's workshop.
The city is more than its holy sites. The old town souk is a tangle of steep, narrow lanes with Ottoman-era stone buildings, 19th-century Venetian-style houses with painted ceiling frescoes, and vendors selling spices, Arabic sweets, and coffee. The White Mosque, Nazareth's oldest mosque, anchors the market quarter. The food is excellent — Nazareth has become one of the best places in Israel to eat Arabic cuisine, with restaurants serving dishes like maqluba, knafeh, and slow-cooked lamb that draw visitors from across the country.
Most pilgrims pass through quickly, but it is worth staying longer. The surrounding hills of the Galilee are beautiful, the Jezreel Valley stretches out to the south, and the old villages nearby give a sense of what this landscape looked like before modernisation. Mary's Well, the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation (a rival tradition to the Catholic basilica), and the Synagogue Church — said to be where Jesus preached — are all within walking distance of each other. Nazareth Village offers an excellent recreation of first-century Galilean life.