The Western Wall Tunnels: Underground Jerusalem

What Lies Beneath

The Western Wall that visitors see and pray at in Jerusalem’s Old City is impressive — but it represents only a fraction of the original structure. The visible wall rises about 19 meters above the plaza. Below the surface, it continues another 13 meters to bedrock. And along its length, only about 60 meters of the wall are exposed in the familiar prayer plaza.

The full Western Wall extends approximately 488 meters (1,601 feet) — nearly half a kilometer — most of it hidden beneath the buildings of the Muslim Quarter that have been constructed against and over it across the centuries.

The Western Wall Tunnels are the archaeological excavations that have revealed this hidden wall, creating an underground journey through 2,000 years of history beneath the living city.

The Excavations

The modern excavation of the tunnels began after Israel captured the Old City in the 1967 Six-Day War. Archaeologists — led initially by Meir Ben-Dov and later by Dan Bahat — began carefully excavating northward along the wall from the prayer plaza, uncovering layer after layer of history.

The work was extraordinarily delicate. Above the excavation sites were inhabited buildings, mosques, and streets. Every dig had to be conducted without compromising the structures above. The political sensitivity was also intense — excavations near the Temple Mount were (and remain) a source of friction between Israeli authorities and Muslim religious leaders.

Despite these challenges, the excavations revealed structures of staggering scale and sophistication.

The Herodian Stones

The most immediately striking feature of the tunnels is the scale of the masonry. King Herod the Great, who rebuilt the Temple Mount between approximately 20 BCE and the early 1st century CE, employed stones of almost unbelievable size.

The tunnel reveals stones that dwarf anything visible from the surface. The individual blocks are precisely cut, fitted together without mortar, and feature the characteristic Herodian margin — a flat border chiseled around the stone’s face. The craftsmanship is extraordinary: even after 2,000 years, a knife blade cannot be inserted between many of the stones.

The most famous stone is the Western Stone (Even HaMa’aravit), which measures approximately 13.6 meters long, 3.5 meters high, and an estimated 4.5 meters deep. It weighs approximately 570 tons. For comparison, the largest stones at Stonehenge weigh about 45 tons, and the average block in the Great Pyramid weighs 2.5 tons.

How Herod’s engineers quarried, transported, and precisely placed a 570-ton stone remains one of the great engineering mysteries of the ancient world. Current theories involve massive wooden rollers, earthen ramps, and thousands of workers, but no definitive answer has been established.

Warren’s Gate

In 1867, British Royal Engineer Charles Warren explored the underground areas around the Temple Mount and discovered an ancient sealed gate in the Western Wall. Now known as Warren’s Gate, it was one of the original entrances to the Temple Mount platform during the Second Temple period.

Warren’s Gate is significant for a specific reason: it is the closest accessible point to where the Holy of Holies — the innermost chamber of the Temple, where God’s presence was believed to dwell — once stood. The gate is directly west of the Foundation Stone (Even HaShetiyah), which Jewish tradition identifies as the location of the Holy of Holies.

Although the gate itself is sealed, the alcove in front of it has become a place of intense prayer. A small synagogue has been established in the tunnel at this point, and worshippers come to pray at what they consider the most sacred accessible spot in Judaism.

The Hasmonean Channel

The tunnels also revealed a water channel dating to the Hasmonean period (2nd-1st centuries BCE) — before Herod’s massive building project. This channel, carved through bedrock, was part of the system that brought water to the Temple for the elaborate purification rituals and sacrificial system.

The Hasmonean-era remains show that the Temple Mount underwent significant construction even before Herod’s famous expansion. The tunnels provide a rare glimpse into the pre-Herodian infrastructure that supported the Temple.

The Strouthion Pool

At the northern end of the tunnel tour, visitors encounter the Strouthion Pool — a massive underground water reservoir that was originally an open-air pool during the Second Temple period. The pool was part of the water system that served the Temple Mount and the surrounding city.

The pool was later roofed over and incorporated into the Roman-built Antonia Fortress, and subsequently buried beneath successive layers of construction. Walking through the tunnel above the pool gives a vivid sense of how much of ancient Jerusalem lies hidden beneath the modern surface.

A Second Temple Street

Among the most evocative discoveries is a Herodian-era street that runs along the base of the Western Wall. The original paving stones are still in place, worn smooth by centuries of foot traffic. Walking on this street, visitors literally follow in the footsteps of Jews who walked to the Temple two thousand years ago.

The street was a commercial thoroughfare — shops lined one side, while the massive Wall rose on the other. Archaeologists have found coins, pottery, and other artifacts that paint a picture of daily life in Herodian Jerusalem.

Visiting the Tunnels

The Western Wall Tunnels are open to visitors through guided tours operated by the Western Wall Heritage Foundation. The tour takes approximately 75 minutes and follows the length of the underground wall from south to north, emerging near the Via Dolorosa in the Muslim Quarter.

The experience is profound. Moving through the narrow underground passages, touching stones that Herod’s workers placed 2,000 years ago, standing at Warren’s Gate where the Temple once rose above — the tunnels offer a connection to ancient Jerusalem that the crowded surface above cannot match.

For many visitors, the tunnels transform the Western Wall from a flat surface into a three-dimensional structure of overwhelming scale — a reminder that what we see is always only a fraction of what lies beneath.