Discover the city of Yafo

Yafo (which is also written Jaffa or Yaffo) is now a booming market. The city has started a neighborhood renewal program. Yafo is more and more popular, and becomes the "Bobo" district of Tel-Aviv. The old town, the beach of Cassis have an undeniable attraction on the part of the French-speaking population. Yafo offers atypical properties, and cultural centers, decoration shops, ... Great architects invest there and renowned restorers settle there. Jaffa (in Hebrew יָפוֹ, in Standard Hebrew Yafo, in Tiberian Hebrew Yāp̄ô; in the Tell al Amarna tablets of 1350 BC, Yapu) is the southern, ancient part of the city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa in Israel.

It is one of the oldest ports in the world on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The port of Jaffa, much in demand in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, was, like the two other ports of ancient Palestine—Acre and Caesarea—one of the important stops on the European routes to the East. In the Middle Ages, Jaffa was one of the Scales of the Levant, although of secondary importance in comparison with Acre. Part of the port and some ancient mosaics have survived until today. Jaffa, an Arab city before the exodus of its population in 1948, merged in 1950 with the Jewish city of Tel Aviv.

The name Yaffa or Yaffo is probably of Semitic origin, etymologically related to the Hebrew word yoffi (written יופי) which means “beauty”; yaffa, in Hebrew means "beautiful") (or pleasant, pulchritudo aut decor, says Adrichomius). A Jewish legend associates it with one of the sons of Noah, Japheth (in Hebrew Yefet) who would have founded the port forty years after the Flood. A late Hellenic tradition related by Pliny the Elder attributes it to Jopa, the daughter of Aeolus, the master of the Winds. Jaffa is mentioned on Thutmose III's list and in ancient Egyptian papyri as YP. On the tablets of Tell el-Amarna and on the inscription of Sennacherib, she is mentioned in the form Yapu. In the Arab geographer Al-Muqaddasi, it is remembered under the name of Yaffa, used by the Arabs until today. In the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) the Mediterranean is called the Yaffo Sea (Yam Yaffo) and in the Midrash the Sea of Yaffo (Yamá shel Yaffo). She is named as Joppé or Jophé in the Acts of the Apostles.