Travel in Lebanon: one airport and three strips of sites

How visitors arrive and get around

Beirut International Airport opened on 23 April 1954 and was renamed Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport in 2005, after the former prime minister's assassination. It is the country's only commercial airport and its main gateway. Britannica records that passenger traffic exceeded its capacity by the late 2010s and that expansion work began in 2019.

There is no passenger railway. Britannica describes a network that once ran along the coast, up the Bekaa and across the Lebanon Mountains by cog railway, and that stayed out of service after the civil war despite repairs in 2004. Travel inside the country is therefore by road. A highway along the coast from Tripoli to Sidon was rebuilt after 1990, and international highways cross the country as part of the land routes linking Europe with the Arab countries; Zahle stands close to the road from Beirut to Damascus. Traffic drives on the right.

Ports line the coast. Beirut is the main cargo and passenger port and Jounieh's harbour has grown in importance. Wikipedia's article on tourism also notes that the industry relies on Lebanese living abroad, who return regularly in summer.

Lebanon has no diplomatic relations with Israel, its southern neighbour; the Lebanon: politics article covers the direct talks that began in 2026.

What the coast holds between Tripoli and Tyre

Most of the old towns stand on the coast, and Wikipedia's article on tourism finds only a few in the interior. Going south from the Syrian border:

Tyre gave its name to Tyrian purple, the dye first made there, and founded colonies as far as Carthage and Cádiz. It was an island until Alexander built a causeway to take it in 332 BC, and its old town stands at the tip of the peninsula. Byblos has been inhabited since the Neolithic, and Wikipedia's article on tourism ties it to the spread of the Phoenician alphabet. Tripoli takes its Greek name, "triple city", from a Phoenician confederation of Tyre, Sidon and Arados. Sidon's list adds the Phoenician temple of Eshmun and the Marian shrine at Maghdouché to the Sea Castle.

Wikipedia's article on tourism counts about 200 kilometres of seashore, with resorts and water parks along it.

What Beirut keeps in its museums and quarters

Most visits begin and end in the capital, and its museums hold what the excavations elsewhere produced. The National Museum, opened officially in 1942, has about 100,000 objects, mostly from digs by the Directorate General of Antiquities, of which about 1,300 are on display. The archaeological museum of the American University of Beirut dates from 1868, when a gift of Cypriot pottery founded it. The Sursock Museum of modern art occupies a villa in Achrafieh that Nicolas Sursock left to the city at his death in 1961, and Saint Joseph University opened a museum of prehistory in June 2000. Under the Greek Orthodox cathedral of St George on Nejme Square a crypt museum shows the remains of seven churches built on the same site.

The Beirut Central District, rebuilt after the civil war, holds hotels, restaurants and shops, and the Emir Assaf Mosque, inaugurated in 1597 on the old Serail square. Wikipedia's article on tourism describes its squares as summer concert venues and its streets as quiet after office hours, and names Badaro, Hamra, Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhaël as the busier quarters. The Raouche rock stands off the western shore.

Crafts are made mostly in villages and sold in the towns. The same article lists basketry, carpet weaving, pottery, copper and metalwork, embroidery, glass blowing and gold and silver smithing, with different regions specialising in each, and Sidon has a museum of soap-making.

Which pilgrim sites draw visitors

Religious sites are a large part of what visitors come for, and they belong to every community. The shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon at Harissa, 20 kilometres north of Beirut, is a Marian pilgrimage site reached from Jounieh by road or by a gondola lift, the téléférique, in about nine minutes. At Maghdouché, near Sidon, the shrine of Our Lady of Mantara has a cave that tradition holds the Virgin Mary rested in. At Zahle a ten-metre bronze statue of the Virgin stands on a 54-metre tower built from 1958 above the town.

The Muslim sites are as old. The Mansouri Great Mosque of Tripoli was built in the Mamluk period, between 1294 and 1314, around the remains of a Crusader church. In the Bekaa the village of Nabi Shayth has a mosque over a grave identified as that of Seth, and Wikipedia's article on tourism dates a mosque of Ibrahim al-Khalil in Baalbek to 635. In the north the monastery of Mar Sarkis stands at about 1,500 metres above the Qozhaya valley, east of Ehden, and the Gibran Museum, founded in 1935 in a former monastery in Bsharri, 120 kilometres from Beirut, holds 440 of Khalil Gibran's paintings and drawings and his tomb.

What lies up in the mountains

The Lebanon Mountains rise directly behind the coast, and the Lebanon: geography article explains how steeply. Their northern end holds the Qadisha valley, listed by UNESCO in 1998 with the Forest of the Cedars of God above it. The valley's cliffs are cut with caves, hermitages and monasteries, among them Qannubin, St Anthony of Qozhaya, which tradition dates to the 4th century, and Our Lady of Hawqa, founded by villagers from Hawqa in the late 13th century, and terraces still worked by the villages. The cedar forest stands between 1,900 and 2,050 metres east of Bsharri, and UNESCO notes the pressure on it from souvenir shops on one side and an illegal building on the other.

Further south the Shouf holds two kinds of visit. Deir el Qamar, five kilometres from Beiteddine, is a village of stone houses with red-tiled roofs, the residence of the governors of Lebanon from the 16th to the 18th century, with Fakhr al-Din II's palace and a 15th-century mosque. Above them the Shouf Biosphere Reserve runs along the crest from Dahr el-Baidar to Jezzine, and its listing records more than 250 bird species, many of them seen at the Ammiq wetland.

The Lebanon Mountain Trail links much of this on foot. Wikipedia's article on the trail gives it as running from Andaket in the north to Marjayoun in the south through more than 76 towns and villages, at heights from 570 to 2,073 metres, and describes walkers staying in village guesthouses, since camping is little practised. The trail was proposed in 2002 and built with United States aid between 2006 and 2008, and its association leads a full-length group walk every spring.

What the outdoors offers between the reserves

The mountains are also used for sport. Wikipedia's article on tourism lists hiking in the Shouf cedar reserve, at Horsh Ehden and along the Nahr Ibrahim, paragliding from The Cedars, Ehden, Miziara, Harissa, Barouk and Faraya, caving, and rafting, a recent addition, on the Litani and the Awali. The destinations the article lists also include Jeita Grotto, a limestone cave, and the Palm Islands nature reserve.

Ehden, at 1,450 metres in the North Governorate, is visited mostly by Lebanese, with the forest reserve of Horsh Ehden beside it. In Tripoli the old souk and the port quarter of El Mina are the parts visitors walk, and Byblos combines its ruins and souk with a harbour, beaches and an international festival each summer. The festivals at Baalbek, Byblos and Beiteddine bring Lebanese and international performers to archaeological and historical sites, mainly in summer.

Why the Bekaa is a separate journey

The Bekaa lies about 30 kilometres east of Beirut behind the Lebanon Mountains, drier than the coast and colder in winter. Zahle, at a mean height of about 1,000 metres where Mount Lebanon meets the plain, is the capital of the Bekaa Governorate, and the Lebanon: culture article traces the region's wine to antiquity.

Baalbek lies in the north of the valley. UNESCO describes it as a Phoenician town that became Heliopolis under the Greeks and a sanctuary of the Heliopolitan Jupiter under Rome, drawing thousands of pilgrims to temples built over two centuries. Six of the 54 Corinthian columns of the Temple of Jupiter still stand, each 22 metres high. The purpose of the Temple of Bacchus beside it is not known, and the small domed Temple of Venus was converted into a church of St Barbara in the Byzantine period. The Baalbek International Festival is staged among the ruins.

Anjar is an Umayyad town of the early 8th century laid out on a Roman grid: two crossing avenues, palaces, baths and mosques inside walls more than two metres thick, over an area of 114,000 square metres. Two main avenues cross at its centre, the Cardo Maximus running north to south at 20 metres wide and the Decumanus Maximus running east to west, the plan of a Roman town built by a Muslim dynasty with stonework borrowed from Byzantine practice. The modern town of Anjar was founded by Armenian refugees from Alexandretta in 1939.

When each strip is easiest to visit

The seasons decide which part of the country suits a visit. Summer on the coast is long, hot and humid, and Wikipedia's article on the geography records that people from the coastal cities have long moved up to mountain resorts for the hot months. The mountains have the opposite year: frost and heavy snow in winter, and snow on the highest peaks into early summer. Wikipedia's article on tourism describes Alpine and cross-country skiing within sight of the sea, at resorts such as Mzaar Kfardebian, and camping between May and September.

Spring and autumn are transitional. Rain returns in winter, mostly after December, and falls in a few heavy downpours; the khamsin, a hot wind from the Egyptian desert, blows mostly in spring. The Bekaa is drier and colder in winter than the coast, with January nights near 2 °C in Britannica's figures. Wikipedia's article on tourism counts about 300 days of sunshine a year.

How the wars have changed the map

The south has been the part most affected. The newest Lebanese World Heritage property, the Mount Amel Castles, was inscribed in 2026. In the war that began on 2 March 2026 Israel ordered inhabitants of the whole area south of the Litani River to leave, and Britannica records an Israeli plan to occupy the south up to the river. Freedom House reports that residents of the south have lived with the risk of land mines since the civil war.

The effect reaches beyond the south. The World Bank's report of August 2026 expects the conflict and flight disruptions across the region to halt tourism for the year, after it had helped drive the recovery of 2025. This catalogue gives no safety verdict; governments publish their own advisories, and they change faster than a reference page is rebuilt.