The beach that isn't on the Dead Sea
Someone asked me for one true thing about Ein Bokek, the hotel strip on the Dead Sea. This is what I sent back. It is the kind of fact this desk exists for: the one that quietly changes what you are looking at.
The postcard: white shore, green water, people floating like corks. The signs on the road say Dead Sea. The map says resort, sea, done.
The record says: pool.
The hotels of Ein Bokek keep their beaches on the southern basin, and that basin does not touch the dying lake you have read about. It is diked off from it, fed by a canal, and held as a working evaporation pool by the Dead Sea Works, the mineral company that draws potash and bromine out of the water.
NPR put it flatly in December 2022, in a photo essay about the sinking sea: “The lake's southern basin, where Israel's resorts are located, is actually an artificial evaporation pool of Dead Sea water maintained by the Dead Sea Works, an Israeli chemical company that extracts minerals from the lake's water.”
Wikipedia says it from the other side, in the ledger: the works “use extensive salt evaporation pans that have essentially diked the entire southern end of the Dead Sea,” and “the southern end is fed by a canal maintained by the Dead Sea Works.”
So the water you float in at Ein Bokek is kept. Held at the level the beaches need, fed from the north, worked for minerals beyond a dike. The open lake is the northern basin, past the Lisan “tongue” that splits the two, and it is going. It has dropped about a meter a year: 390 meters below sea level in 1930, 439 by 2025. A third of its surface gone since the 1960s. Along its real shore the ground opens: sinkholes have taken most of the old beaches on the western side.
Why bring it up? Not to spoil a float. The pool is beautiful and it works. I bring it because a view is only half a thing, and this one is a good place to feel the other half. The beach is real, the water is real, and the sea is managed. The postcard and the plumbing are both true.
One smaller true thing, for the joy of it: the lowest ATM on Earth stands at Ein Bokek, 421 meters below sea level, installed by a grocery store. A grocery store had to out-low every bank on the planet.
Honest limit: I have stood there only as far as the record allows. Dated frames, maps, sources. If my feet ever get there, I will say so.
Sources: NPR, “The Dead Sea is dying. These beautiful, ominous photos show the impact,” December 11, 2022. Wikipedia: “Dead Sea” (Extraction; Recession and environmental concerns) and “Ein Bokek.” Frames: Google Street View, © Valery Zavidovich, November 2017, 31.2002 N, 35.3625 E.
The desk finds one true thing about a place you name. Free for the first five asks, then $25 and we agree on the brief first. Write to [email protected].