EZTrip.com International Destination Guide and Hotel Listings

20min from Jerusalem on Egged bus #185 and #186, every 30min.

Fourteen kilometres west of Jerusalem, Abu Ghosh is a Christian village named after an early nineteenth-century bandit chieftain licensed by the Ottomans to extract "taxes" from passing travellers. In the 1948 war, Abu Ghosh took the side of the Israelis, as a result of which its inhabitants have been labelled "collaborators" by other Palestinians. At the top of the village, the 1924 Church of Notre Dame de l'Arche de l'Alliance (Our Lady of the Ark of the Covenant) is said to occupy the site of the house of Abinadab where the Ark of the Covenant rested for twenty years (I Samuel 7:1-2) until taken by David to Jerusalem. It is built on the site of a fifth-century Byzantine church, whose floor mosaics are still visible.

At the bottom of the village are a khan , erected by the early Arab rulers in the ninth century, and a Crusader church , put up by the Knights Hospitallers in the twelfth century, the latter restored by Benedictine monks at the end of the nineteenth century, who also added a small monastery . Abu Ghosh is most popular, however, with gourmets, who come to sample the pricey but excellent Palestinian cooking of the Caravan Inn restaurant, founded in 1947 (tel 534 2744; daily 11am-11pm), and the several imitators that have sprung up alongside it.