Travelling in Libya: classical cities visited mostly from inside the country

Who visits Libya's Greek and Roman cities

The Tourism Information and Documentation Centre, part of the Ministry of Tourism and Handicrafts, published its report on the first quarter of 2026 in May 2026. It counted more than 121,000 visitors at cities and archaeological sites between January and March, and named Cyrene first among the destinations and Sabratha second. Hotels and tourist villages received more than 159,000 guests in the same three months, concentrated in Tripoli and, after it, in the Green Mountain region of the east and in Benghazi.

International tourists were a separate line. The report recorded 974 of them in the quarter, from 54 nationalities, with China and Italy at the head of the list, and the ministry put the growth in tourist arrivals at more than 41% on the first quarter of 2025. The two figures measure different things, but their scale is plain: 974 is under 1% of 121,000. Wikipedia's article on Libya supplies the other half of the picture, recording that many Libyans go to the beach and visit their own archaeological sites, Leptis Magna especially.

Earlier counts use other definitions and do not join into one series. Wikipedia's article on tourism in Libya gives 149,000 tourists in 2004 and 180,000 in 2007, with a further 1,000,000 day visitors in 2007, when tourism made up less than 1% of GDP. A Euronews report, carried by The Libya Observer, cited ministry data for 282,000 visitors touring the major archaeological sites in the first half of 2025, while the Wikipedia article puts tourist numbers at about 100,000 a year as of 2025.

Tourism got a ministry of its own on 22 March 2012, and the same Wikipedia article records that the two rival governments which followed have not taken forward the plan of that year to draw in foreign investment.

How a foreign visitor gets into Libya

The sources on file disagree about the visa itself. The Euronews report credited an electronic visa system introduced in 2024 with ending a process that had taken many months. Wikipedia's article on tourism in Libya, last revised in January 2026, says Libya is not issuing tourist visas. The British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office tells British travellers to ask the Libyan embassy in London which visa a trip requires, and warns that "a Libyan visa issued overseas may not be recognised in some areas or at certain ports of entry".

The other rules leave less room for doubt, as the FCDO's pages stood in October 2026. A passport that shows earlier travel to Israel is refused. Every short-stay visitor has to register with the police within a week of arriving, which the company being visited or the local travel agency usually arranges, and a visitor who has not registered can be fined on leaving. The law requires foreigners to carry their passport, and Libya does not recognise dual nationality. British consular help is not available in person inside the country; the embassy in Tunis handles it.

Tripoli International Airport has been closed since 2014, after fighting between armed groups in the area around it. Mitiga Airport, which operates the international flights, is the only civilian airport working in Tripoli, and it closed for a time in August 2023 when clashes broke out in the centre of the city. Flights at every Libyan airport can be cancelled at short notice. Every land border can close at short notice too, and Wikipedia records the borders with Chad, Niger, Sudan and Algeria as closed and in practice controlled by Tuareg and Toubou people. The land border with Tunisia was the way in and out during the United Nations embargo, a crossing the same article calls arduous and physically exhausting.

The FCDO's advice, updated on 21 July 2026 and still current on 16 October 2026, is against all travel to Libya except to three named areas: Tripoli, Misrata and an eastern area taking in Benghazi, Al-Bayda, Derna and the Jebel Akhdar from Al-Maqrun to Al-Tamimi. For those three it advises against "all but essential travel". Sabratha, 80 kilometres west of Tripoli, lies outside the named cities, and so does the whole of the Fezzan. The advice changes, and this page records its shape on one date without taking a view of it.

What Italy dug out at Leptis Magna and Sabratha

Before 1911 nobody had done any archaeological research in Tripolitania or Cyrenaica, by the account in Wikipedia's article on Italian Libya. By the late 1920s the Italian government was paying for excavations at Leptis Magna and Sabratha, and the same article states the purpose plainly. Classical archaeology was a propaganda tool to justify the colony, and the two Roman cities were being prepared for archaeological tourism. After the Fascist takeover every foreign expedition was forced out, and the work served Italian museums and journals alone.

The Punic towns of this coast, Oea, Libdah and Sabratha, stood in the area later called Tripolis, the Three Cities, which gave Tripoli its name. Oea became Tripoli itself and Libdah became Leptis Magna.

What remains standing at Leptis Magna

Wikipedia dates the Phoenician founding of Leptis Magna to the tenth century BC. It joined the Roman province of Africa around 23 BC and was at its height in the second and third centuries AD as the home of the Severan dynasty, to which the emperor Septimius Severus belonged. A Berber tribe sacked it in 523 AD. The city was abandoned to the desert, looters carried off its stone for centuries, and excavation began in the 1920s.

The theatre stands out first, and its upper tiers look across the whole city. In the Hadrianic Baths one pool, 28 by 15 metres, is still intact. The circus lies nearly a kilometre from the main site and is only partly excavated, though its ground measures 450 by 100 metres, and Libya has no other. The site museum holds five coloured mosaics made in the first or second century AD.

Where Sabratha's mosaics meet the shore

Sabratha began as a Phoenician trading post around 500 BC and was Romanised and rebuilt in the second and third centuries AD. Earthquakes damaged it badly in the fourth century, and Byzantine governors rebuilt it on a smaller scale. Its late third-century theatre keeps its three-storey architectural backdrop. Temples to Liber Pater, Serapis and Isis stand around it, with a Christian basilica from the time of Justinian. The mosaics survive best in the coloured floors of the seaward baths, which overlook the shore directly, and in the black and white floors of the theatre baths.

Why Cyrene draws visitors to the Green Mountain

Greek settlers from the island of Thera founded Cyrene in 630 BC. The cities that grew up around it, among them Euhesperides, which is now Benghazi, and Apollonia, the port of Cyrene, were known together as the Pentapolis, the Five Cities, and Cyrene itself was known for its medical school and its academies. The site lies near the village of Shahhat. Its temple of Apollo was first built as early as the seventh century BC, a temple to Zeus is still partly unexcavated, and a large necropolis lies between Cyrene and Apollonia, its port 16 kilometres away. Italian archaeology arrived later here than in the west, after the colonial war in Cyrenaica had ended in the province's "pacification". The first Sanusi zawiya in Libya had been founded near the ruins long before, in 1843.

Cyrene stands in the Jabal al Akhdar, the Green Mountain, a limestone plateau named for its cover of pine, juniper, cypress and wild olive, which takes 400 to 600 mm of rain in a year. Britannica has the range rising steeply from the coast between Al-Marj and Derna to about 600 metres and reaching nearly 900 metres some 30 kilometres inland. In 2007 a project called the Green Mountain Sustainable Development Area, with Saif al-Islam Gaddafi involved in it, set out to bring tourism to Cyrene and to preserve the Greek ruins around it.

How the floods of Storm Daniel reached the ruins

Storm Daniel struck eastern Libya in September 2023. At Cyrene, structures and finds still in place were buried in mud or carried downstream into the Mansura area, and the same floods exposed parts of the city that had never been excavated. The International Crisis Group warned that the site was at risk of collapse, citing the erosion of its outer walls and drainage channels and the contaminated wastewater running through the ruins. Apollonia and Athrun were damaged too.

In December 2025 The Art Newspaper quoted Victoria Leitch of the British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies on Libya's sites in general. Some were damaged in the fighting after 2011, others have been exposed to coastal erosion and climate change or harmed by commercial development, and she linked the trade in stolen artefacts to human trafficking and drugs.

What Tripoli keeps inside its old walls

Tripoli was once called the "White Bride of the Mediterranean", and its old walled city still holds virtually all of its historic mosques, khans, hammams and houses. The street plan goes back to the Roman period, when walls went up against attacks from the interior, and a wall on the sea side followed in the eighth century. Three gates led in: Bab Zanata in the west, Bab Hawara in the south-east and Bab al-Bahr in the north wall. The walls still stand. A month after the National Museum reopened, The Libya Observer reported that extensive restoration had been carried out in the Old City with support from UNESCO.

The Red Castle, Assaraya al-Hamra, sits on the northern promontory above what used to be the sea, and a motorway and 500 metres of reclaimed land now lie between the two. Its courtyards, alleys and houses cover about 13,000 square metres and carry the work of the Turks, the Karamanlis, the Spaniards, the Knights of Malta and the Italians. The Italians opened a museum there in 1919 and Gaddafi a new one in 1988. It closed in 2011 and reopened as the National Museum of Libya on 12 December 2025, after a restoration with design help from UNESCO, a history told at more length under Libyan culture.

The FCDO records the conditions around all of it. Clashes between armed groups in Tripoli killed 32 people and injured more than 150 in 2022, and power cuts reach the city in summer.

Where the Sahara routes ran before the war

The Saharan plateau makes up about nine-tenths of Libya, and about half of it is sand desert, in Britannica's description. Before the war most European desert tourists spent their time in the Fezzan, the south-west, by the account of Wikipedia's tourism article. Its list takes in the rock art of the Acacus mountains, which run on into the Tassili n'Ajjer in Algeria, the rock art of Wadi Mathendous nearby, the Ottoman forts at Murzuq, the lakes ringed by dunes in the Ubari sand sea and the ruins of the Garamantes.

The paintings at Wadi Mathendous and in the Acacus show a Sahara with rivers, grassy plateaus, giraffes, elephants and crocodiles, and Wikipedia's article on Libyan culture dates some of the Acacus paintings and carvings to 14,000 years ago. The Garamantes, a Saharan people of Berber origin based at Germa, built an elaborate underground irrigation system and were a local power in the Sahara between 500 BC and 500 AD.

Which routes overland travellers drove

Independent desert travel began in the late 1990s, when well-connected Libyan middlemen could obtain the invitation a visa application needed. At the border a vehicle took rented Libyan number plates and a temporary import permit, with documents in Arabic, so a fixer was needed to get through. Up to 2002 a visitor could still travel without an escort from a local agency, and with currency bought on the black market near the border, fuel cost a few pence a litre.

Ghat, in the far south-west, was the destination most of them drove to, along the 600-kilometre border track south from Ghadames to Serdeles or straight through the Ubari sand sea with a local guide. From Sabha a route ran east to the volcanic crater of Waw an Namus and on to Kufra. A line past a spur of the Tibesti crossed ground mined during the conflict between Chad and Libya, and in 1985 the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that a third of Libya's rangeland was contaminated by landmines and unexploded munitions, a legacy Fanack traces to the Second World War.

What the south holds for visitors now

The FCDO advice of 2026 leaves the Fezzan outside every area it names. Its safety page records a greater concentration of terrorist groups in that province, and judges that any kidnapping for ransom by such a group would be likely to happen in the south. Four foreign nationals were kidnapped in south-east Libya in 2018. The Rock-Art Sites of Tadrart Acacus, inscribed in 1985, have been on the danger list since 2016.

Ghadames, near the borders with Tunisia and Algeria and about 450 kilometres from Tripoli by The Art Newspaper's figure, is the one of the five whose status has moved. Its Old Town was inscribed in 1986 and put on the danger list with the others in 2016, and the paper reported in December 2025 that its status had changed that year. The town has a festival of its own, and Gaddafi's government patronised Tuareg culture through it, in Wikipedia's account of the war of 2011.

When the coast and the desert can be visited

Libya's coast keeps a Mediterranean year, a cool rainy winter and a hot dry summer, and from October to March westerly winds bring storms and rain across the north. July and August are the warmest months and January and February the coolest. Inland the rain comes on a few days between November and January, the Sahara gets under 25 mm in a year, and many places there have recorded 200 consecutive days without rain. Britannica notes that Sabha's averages hide how far the temperature can swing within a single day.

Several times a year the ghibli blows from the south over the whole country, after a short lull. It is a hot dry wind carrying so much dust that the sky turns red and visibility falls below 18 metres. Heavy rain does arrive: Storm Daniel damaged hospitals and telecommunications networks across the east in September 2023, the FCDO records flooding in Tripoli and Misrata in December 2024, and Timeanddate lists two extreme weather holidays on 21 and 22 January 2026.

The religious calendar moves through these seasons with the Hijri year. Ramadan began on 19 February 2026, Eid al-Fitr fell on 20 to 22 March, and Eid al-Adha, with the Day of Arafah before it, ran from 26 to 29 May. During Ramadan the FCDO asks visitors not to eat, drink, smoke or chew gum in public in daytime, inside a car included. The fixed national days are Revolution Day on 17 February, Liberation Day on 23 October and Independence Day on 24 December, the date in 1951 on which Libya became independent.

How travel inside Libya works day to day

There is no passenger railway. The Italians began a line from Tripoli to Benghazi in 1941 that was never completed, and Wikipedia's article on Libya says new railways are planned. Between cities the bus is the usual public transport, and many people drive. The FCDO calls road travel highly dangerous, with carjacking and robbery among the risks and a very high risk on the coastal road between Zawiyah and Tripoli. Petrol can be hard to find, with long queues at the stations.

Money means cash. Bank cards cannot be used at banks, cash machines or hotels, the central bank restricts withdrawals during a severe shortage of notes, and no bank will change foreign currency. Exchange offices approved by the central bank are legal and operate at black-market rates. Taking dinars out of Libya is illegal. The parallel rate itself is explained under the economy.

In many small towns there are no restaurants, and the food shops are the only place to buy a meal. Couscous, bazeen and shurba are common dishes, bazeen a barley dish eaten by hand from one shared bowl. Pasta is the staple in the west and rice in the east, and snack vendors all over the country sell khubs bi' tun, bread filled with tuna, harissa and olive oil. Alcohol is illegal everywhere in Libya. Tea follows the meal in three rounds, and two Wikipedia articles disagree about its colour, the tourism article describing mainly green tea and the article on Libya black. Both put roasted peanuts or almonds into the third glass.

Arabic is the official language, English is widely understood in the major cities and Italian is still used in commerce. Photographs at or near military facilities need permission first, and any attempt to convert a Muslim is illegal. Clocks stay on UTC+2 all year, as they have since 5 November 2012, traffic drives on the right, and sockets carry 230 volts in the Europlug, Schuko and Type L patterns.