The Municipal Market

The story

The municipal market of Beersheba is a market of food, clothing and household goods, and it is the central market of the metropolis. It sits on the transport axis between David Hacham Road, the central bus station and the railway station, and Hebron Road and Rambam Street. In 1961 a market of ninety shops was dedicated near the Old City, built by private investors. In 1965 the Beersheba Development Company began to build a new municipal market on an area of sixty dunams, and within it a new compound for the Bedouin market. The construction was delayed because of archaeological excavations that were carried out at the place and in which remains from the Byzantine period were found — that is, the ground beneath the stalls had already been used a previous time. The new Bedouin market was dedicated in 1967 and the municipal market in 1969, and since then it has served the residents of the city and the localities of the surroundings. Until the year 2000 it was managed by the Beersheba Economic Development Company, which is owned by the municipality, and since then it has been managed by an association of the market's traders. The market extends today over about fifty dunams and about six hundred and twenty-two stalls and shops operate in it — fruit and vegetables, butchers, fish, spices, clothing and footwear, jewelry and household goods, and beside them flower stalls, a pharmacy and workers' restaurants. It is divided into four quarters according to the type of merchandise, and the stalls are numbered. Quarter Gimel is the oldest of them, the one in which the market began, and it is still built in its original bricks. Among the stalls there are those that have operated since its first days, some of them by a third and a fourth generation of the same family.

• Archaeology
• Byzantine
• Bedouin
• Beersheba