While most of the real estate on the Mount of Olives is occupied by the alabaster headstones of the world's largest and oldest Jewish cemetery, the modest mount (really more of a hill with aspirations) is also home to perhaps Jerusalem's thickest concentration of Christian sites outside the Christian Quarter. As the mount and its environs were the base of operations for Jesus and his disciples during their Jerusalem ministry, holy sites and churches of fantastic antiquity and impressive beauty dot the slopes, and no pilgrimage to Jerusalem could be called complete without a day spent tracing the footsteps of Jesus through the olive groves and headstones.

How the Mount of Olives got its name is no mystery: like the rest of the Judean Hills, it was once covered in olive trees, and even today, when agricultural considerations have yielded to devotional ones, olive groves persist in the Kidron Valley at the foot of the mount (some of the trees are reputed to be nearly a millennium old), clustered near the striking Tomb of Absalom - which, romanticism aside, is a Hasmonean-era upper-class Jewish tomb, not the final resting place of David's problem child.

But the first thing any first-time Mount of Olives visitor's eyes will alight upon is doubtless the golden onion domes of the Church of Mary Magdalene, a Russian Orthodox study in ostentation that nevertheless has become an integral part of the view east from Jerusalem. Two female Orthodox martyrs are buried beneath the church, which is a major site of Russian Orthodox pilgrimage, though it is open to visitors of all faiths during its limited daily visiting hours.

Beneath the Church of Mary Magdalene is the Garden of Gethsemane, infamous site of Jesus' torment and betrayal, preserved to this day, a unmissable patch of manicured greenery reaching partway up the mountain's slopes. The name Gethsemane is in fact another nod to the mountain's more olive-y past; it is Aramaic for "oil press," and more likely than not the garden was once the site of the one of the oil presses of ancient Jerusalem that processed olive oil for everything from cooking and lamp lighting to ceremonial use in the nearby Temple.

Below the garden rises the unmistakable Church of All Nations, AKA the Basilica of the Agony, a Roman Catholic church built over the traditional site of Jesus' night of prayer in the garden before surrendering to the authorities, notable for its impressive mosaic facade and curious bubble-domed roof. As you walk up the slopes, you'll come across the teardrop-shaped Dominus Flevit, where Jesus wept as he predicted the downfall of Jerusalem, and the Church of Pater Noster, built over the spot where Jesus first preached the Lord's Prayer, and worth a visit for its artistic reproductions of said prayer in dozens upon dozens of world languages, some quite obscure. Further along the Kidron Valley is Mary's Tomb, an ancient Orthodox shrine that holds, according to the Orthodox, the final remains of Mary, mother of Jesus.

Your reward for all that walking awaits at the top of the mountain: one of the most stunning views of old and new Jerusalem and its environs that anyone could ever hope to see.