The Lowest Bar in the World: Refreshments on Kalia Beach by the Dead Sea
A blue sign hangs above the counter: The Lowest Bar in the World, minus 420 meters. A little further on, by the water, a second one stands: The Lowest Point On Earth, minus 430. Ten meters apart on the same beach - and neither one is right, because the Dead Sea has since sunk even lower.
The Lowest Bar in the World (Hebrew: הבר הנמוך בעולם) is a beach bar on Kalia Beach on the northern shore of the Dead Sea, and the lowest place on Earth where you can buy a cup of coffee - a stop, on a trip through Israel, for anyone who keeps a list of firsts. And it's a record the bar doesn't even have to work at: it improves itself.
A Record That Improves Itself
Otherwise the place isn't named anything special - the Hebrew sign says literally the same thing as the English one. Trying to track down who actually granted the title is pointless: you won't find an entry for it in the Guinness Book of Records - the bar awarded itself the title, and nobody has come to take it away yet. The only spot on dry land where you can sit hundreds of meters below sea level and wave down a waiter is the Dead Sea basin: the resorts on the opposite Jordanian shore quote the same numbers on their own websites, and Route 90, the road you take to get here, calls itself the lowest road in the world. A Czech mountain chalet brags about its altitude on every sign it can find; the same kind of sign hangs here, just with a minus sign added in front of the number.
People Ate Here Long Before Anyone Called It a Record
The beach and the bar are both run by Kibbutz Kalia, which has a longer claim to hospitality at this depth than you'd expect from a beach bar. The Kalia company started building a spa here back in 1932 - and the very first building, opened a year later, was a spa house with a restaurant. People were coming to eat and drink on the lowest dry land in the world long before anyone turned it into a slogan. Then came cottages for workers from the potash factory, and in 1974 today's kibbutz; the authorities assigned it the name Almog, but the settlers won the old name back. Formally, Kalia sits in the West Bank, in an area under Israeli administration - that, too, is part of the local geography, just like the minus sign on the altitude.
The bar owes its moving record to sadder arithmetic. The Jordan River, which has always topped up the sea, gets siphoned off along the way for irrigation and drinking water, and at the southern end the potash works evaporate off more of it in their pools. The water level is dropping by roughly a meter a year, and over the past fifty years it has fallen by more than forty meters - today it sits around 441 meters below sea level. The sign reading minus 420 was accurate once; the one reading minus 430 became accurate a bit later, and repainting both every season is clearly nobody's idea of fun. So nobody bothers carving an exact number into the wood anymore.
What's on the Menu and How to Get There
The kitchen is a beach kitchen, no pretensions: hummus, falafel, fries, pizza, cocktails including a Dead Sea Margarita, and beer on tap - if Israeli brands don't mean anything to you, the cushions in the lounge area will fill you in, printed with the logos of Goldstar and Maccabi. Espresso cost 11 ILS (3 EUR), hummus 35 ILS (9.60 EUR), six falafel balls 15 ILS (4 EUR), and fries 36 ILS (10 EUR). You pay extra here for the coordinates - and this is the only refreshment stand in the whole area that can get away with it.
Bus number 486 runs from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea: just under an hour for 16 ILS (4.40 EUR), then a twenty-minute walk from the stop. Beach entry costs 18 ILS, and a lounger with a parasol another 35 ILS (9.60 EUR) per person; the showers run fresh water, which you'll appreciate more here than anywhere else after a dip in a saturated salt solution. And it's worth knowing that the weather runs on a different schedule than just a few hundred meters up: in mid-November the thermometer read thirty degrees, a good ten degrees warmer than in Jerusalem - which makes autumn a gentler season here than summer.
Coffee at the Bottom of the World
I got to the bar exactly the way the previous paragraph describes: bus 486, then the final twenty-minute walk, out of Jerusalem's twenties and into the local thirties. I carried my cup of coffee from the counter all the way down to the water; it was thick, bitter, and topped with foam - not the best coffee I've had in Israel, just the lowest one ever served to me. It cost 11 ILS (3 EUR), and it was the lowest coffee I've ever drunk in my life. On the way back I passed the sign reading minus 430. It was lying too - just a little less than the one above the bar.
Lowest Bar in the World
