Ein Afek Nature Reserve, Wetland nature reserve in Kiryat Bialik, Israel.

Ein Afek Nature Reserve is a wetland with freshwater marshes, swamps, and ponds that provide year-round homes for many waterfowl and aquatic creatures. Two walking trails cross the area: one winds above the wet zones, while the other reaches elevated ground with picnic spots.

Chalcolithic settlers lived by the springs, and an Early Bronze Age Canaanite port town stood here; Afek appears in Egyptian documents of the Middle Bronze Age and was a Phoenician town in the Iron Age. In the 12th–13th centuries the Hospitallers built a fortified farm on Tel Afek and a mill complex by the spring, while the Templars built a fortified mill with a two-storey watchtower and a dam below the tell. The two orders clashed over the water, requiring papal intervention, and their mills supplied flour to Acre until diesel engines replaced water power in the early 20th century.

The place connects to the biblical town of Aphik mentioned in ancient texts, and you can see archaeological traces of people living here since prehistoric times.

The reserve lies east of Kiryat Bialik, and the Crusader mill now serves as a small ethnographic museum at its centre. A floating path crosses the eastern part of the reserve near the Hospitaller mill complex, whose remains are hidden in dense vegetation. A lookout on the tel takes in the whole Acre Valley and the surrounding hills.

The reserve's buffalo were brought from the Hula Reserve in 1991, seven animals in all, to keep the northern meadow open. Their grazing stops trees from taking over. Earlier herds, brought from Egypt by Bedouin of the Ghawarna tribe in the Ottoman period, had died out.