Tiberias has occupied its lakeside strip for two thousand years, a town squeezed between the water and the steep hills behind it, built almost entirely from the black basalt of the region. The fortress that dominates the old waterfront belongs to that material world: heavy dark walls, towers and vaulted spaces, raised in the Crusader period when control of the Galilee and its lake was strategically decisive, then damaged, rebuilt and adapted under later rulers — most visibly during the Ottoman period, when the town's defences were restored and its walls extended. The result is a compact monument in which several eras of military architecture are stacked within a small footprint, right beside the shore. Today the surviving structures have been partly given over to cultural use, so the fortress functions as a public space as well as a historic site. Filmed in 4K, with aerial coverage linking the walls to the lake and the hills, the programme reads Tiberias through its stone: a town whose colour, resilience and long history of destruction and rebuilding are all written in basalt.
