The Efendi Hotel Akko

Two Ottoman Palaces, Joined

Acre is a walled city on a promontory, continuously inhabited for millennia and listed by UNESCO for what the Crusaders and the Ottomans left behind. Two of the grand nineteenth-century houses inside those walls, built for efendis of the ruling class, stand next to each other on Louis IX Street. The Efendi is those two houses joined into one hotel. The restoration ran under Uri Jeremias with Uriya Ganor Studio and it is unusually restrained: painted ceilings kept rather than reproduced, stone left as stone, and the modern additions kept where they cannot argue with the original. The result is a hotel that reads as a house that survived.

Why It Works

Very few places let you sleep inside a living walled city rather than beside one. This one does, and it adds the things a heritage building usually cannot: a genuine Turkish hammam of about four hundred years, a wine bar in the vaulted cellar, a roof terrace facing the sea, and a spa. Dinner is handled by Uri Buri, the seafood restaurant a short walk away that made Acre a food destination in the first place. The scale stays domestic. You are not in a hotel with a historic theme; you are in two Ottoman houses with a reception desk.

Why This Location

Old Acre is small and dense, and everything in it is a walk. The Hospitaller fortress and its Crusader halls, the Templar tunnel running under the city to the port, Al-Jazzar Mosque and its courtyard, the souk and the fishing harbour are all within a few hundred metres of the door. Khan al-Umdan and its clock tower stand at the water. Beyond the ramparts the sea wall path runs the whole circuit of the promontory, and from the hotel roof you see the lighthouse at its tip. Haifa and Rosh Hanikra are short drives north and south. Cars do not really work inside the walls, which is exactly why the old city is still worth staying in.

Fast Facts

• Price: Luxury

• Vibe: Ottoman, stone, hushed, historic

• Rooms: rooms and suites spread across the two joined palaces, several keeping their original painted ceilings

• Best For: couples, heritage travellers, food travellers, anyone touring the north

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: the hammam, roughly four hundred years old and part of the house rather than an addition to it

• Dining: breakfast at the hotel, the wine bar in the vaulted cellar, and Uri Buri for seafood nearby

• Amenities: Turkish hammam and spa, cellar wine bar, roof terrace with sea and lighthouse views, accessible rooms

• Attractions: the Crusader halls of the Hospitaller fortress, the Templar tunnel, Al-Jazzar Mosque, Khan al-Umdan, the souk and the fishing port, the sea walls

The Hammam, Four Centuries Old

The hammam is the reason to book a second night. It is not a spa facility built to look old: it is an actual bath house of around four hundred years, inside the property, restored and put back into use. Book it in the late afternoon, after a day on the stones, and let the heat do what the city has been doing to visitors for a very long time. A spa treatment list runs alongside it for anyone who wants the massage as well.

The Cellar and Uri Buri

Under the house is a vaulted cellar, and the hotel has put its wine bar in it, which is the correct use of a room with that ceiling. Breakfast is served at the hotel and is worth being awake for. Dinner belongs to Uri Buri, the seafood restaurant that Jeremias built a few streets away and that draws people to Acre from across the country. Book it before you arrive; it fills, and it is the other half of what makes this stay work.

Walking the Walled City

Give the old city two days rather than one. The Crusader halls underneath the Ottoman town are the set piece, the Templar tunnel the surprise, and the souk in the late morning the part most visitors rush. Walk the sea wall at dusk when the fishermen are out and the stone holds the heat. Then come back through the lanes to a house that has been standing on this street for two centuries and go up to the roof.