"With 1,200 homes in Caesarea and about 4,000 residents, the town can grow to 10,000 residents, but that will be the limit" Photo: BarEl Properties Group © 1995 - 2008 The International Herald Tribune. All rights reserved

CAESAREA'S ANCIENT REAL ESTATE

CAESAREA, Israel: It was King Herod who first identified the real estate potential of seaside Caesarea in 22 B.C., building a 700-meter port, an aqueduct, a hippodrome and an amphitheater and dedicating the entire city to his emperor, Caesar Augustus.

When the French philanthropist Baron Edmond James de Rothschild bought much of the land around Caesarea at the end of the 19th century, he wanted to maintain its distinctiveness. Now this coastal town, which has been an exclusive vacation haven to Israel's rich and famous for the past 40 years, is being developed as an upscale suburb for the country's young bourgeoisie, offering ample space for large homes and easy commutes to Haifa and Tel Aviv.

"It's a certain kind of place," said Leah Schneider, spokeswoman for the Caesarea Edmond Benjamin de Rothschild Development Corp. "If we sell 30 lots a year, that's a great year because we don't want to overcrowd. We want our growth to happen slowly."

With 1,200 homes in Caesarea and about 4,000 residents, the town can grow to 10,000 residents, but that will be the limit, she said.

Houses in most of the older neighborhoods rarely come on the market, so the corporation is selling plots of 600 and 1,000 square meters, or 6,460 and 10,765 square feet, for $350,000 to $500,000. The sales are in an area called Cluster 13, where the emphasis is on large homes that some locals call McVillas, an Israeli version of the nickname McMansions used for outsized homes in the United States.

There are also plans to build three- to four high-rise towers - Caesarea's first apartments - with spacious units geared toward locals who want to downsize and to build about 20 homes on the golf course. But the golfers in Caesarea "hate the idea," Schneider said, so the plan is on hold.

The development is quite different from what was originally planned by Rothschild, the dreamer enamored of the Caesarea coastline and history. When Israel was established in 1948, the Rothschild family decided to transfer its lands to the state, including the 35,000 dunams that included Caesarea. A dunam is a local measure, the equivalent of 1,000 square meters.

"The baron wanted the settlement to be unique, so he gave the land to the state," Schneider said.

But there was a condition: Funds generated from the sale of Caesarea land would be distributed to Israeli education, arts and culture and welfare organizations by The Caesarea Foundation, an organization controlled equally by the state and the Rothschild family. So the corporation was established with a set of Rothschild-appointed managers, rather than the elected officials of a regular municipality. "No bureaucracy, no elections," Schneider said.

With Baron Benjamin de Rothschild, the benefactor's great-grandson, as the current chairman, the corporation provides municipal services to the residents of Caesarea, it markets land for sale and development, and owns and manages the city's business park, as well as Israel's only 18-hole golf course.

The golf course, which was built in 1961 and runs through ancient Roman and Byzantine ruins, was one of the main reasons that the ancient port city became one of Israel's most exclusive resort towns, where residents today include the billionaire Arcadi Gaydamak; a former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; members of the Rothschild family; and others.

Yvette Renassia and her husband bought a plot 27 years ago and 3 years later immigrated to Caesarea from the Normandy region of France. "We came with the Yamit refugees," said Renassia, referring to some Israeli settlers who were evacuated from their northeastern Sinai settlement in 1982 after a peace treaty was signed with Egypt. "It was all sand and good prices."

Renassia, who now operates Caesarea Real Estate, said prices started rising after 1991, following the Gulf War. Foreigners began buying, coming primarily from England, France, Belgium, South Africa and the United States. But Caesarea continued to be a vacation haven with proximity to the beach and the golf course.

In recent years, however, the changes created by the corporation, including the business park, new neighborhoods and renovated 2,300-foot port have brought in new buyers, primarily younger Israeli families buying houses in the newer clusters, as Caesarea's neighborhoods are called, and making the resort city their full-time home.

Gideon Amir and his wife, Ziva Sharon, bought and renovated their Caesarea home after spending several years working in America. When they returned to Israel, they sold their apartment in Kfar Saba, a suburb north of Tel Aviv, and moved to Cluster 2, one of the older neighborhoods in Caesarea, where the late President Ezer Weizmann once lived.

"Weizmann chose a good neighborhood. We figured it was good enough for us," quipped Amir, who is now selling the house so he and his wife can travel the world.

The four-bedroom house is spacious but homey, with a master bedroom that has a magnificent view of the sea. And like all Caesarea homes, there is a pool, as well as a cabana and a built-in barbecue with its own taboon, an oven for baking pita.

Most of the Israeli residents are families, and there now are 1,000 children in nearby schools. Workers commute and there is a train station in the local business park. Residents can shop locally, but the better markets are in neighboring Pardes Hannah and Or Akiva. There is also the $5 million port area developed by the corporation that is filling up with cafés and restaurants, and abutting many of the area's historic sites.

But, as Schneider noted, Caesarea's history still is an intrinsic part of the development. "All of Caesarea is antiquities: The houses sit on antiquities. When you dig, you find antiquities," she said.