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Coverage / Lebanon

Lebanon

Western Asia

A small eastern Mediterranean country of coast and mountains, where two parallel ranges rise straight off the sea to over 3,000 metres. In a single day you can ski above Beirut and swim below it. Its ground holds Phoenician ports, Roman temples and the cedar forests of the Qadisha Valley, five of them UNESCO World Heritage sites, alongside the Bekaa Valley vineyards and a food and music culture that runs through Beirut, Byblos and Baalbek.

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What you can do in Lebanon

Culinary / Cooking

Beirutyear-roundBeirut is one of the great food cities of the eastern Mediterranean, and the best place to learn Lebanese cooking from the people who carry it. The mezze table, the grilled meats, the herbs and pulses and the pastries are not restaurant inventions here but home cooking, and the city has built genuine ways for visitors to get into a kitchen rather than only a dining room. The anchor is Tawlet, the farmers kitchen in the Mar Mikhael district run by Souk el Tayeb, where a different home cook from a different region cooks each day, and which runs hands-on classes that move from the basics of Lebanese food to specific regional traditions. Around it, Beirut's neighbourhoods hold bakeries, street food, the produce markets and a restaurant scene that ranges from century-old institutions to the new wave. A cooking day here is also a way into the country's regional map, since so much Lebanese food is tied to a particular village or valley. For anyone who wants to cook the food and understand where it comes from, the capital is the classroom.

Museums & Galleries

Beirutyear-roundBeirut holds a museum scene out of all proportion to its size, and two very different institutions make it a real cultural stop rather than only a base. The Sursock Museum, in a 1912 villa in Ashrafieh, is one of the Arab world's early homes of modern art, a place to read Lebanese and international modern and contemporary work and a survivor in its own right, wrecked by the 2020 port explosion and reopened after a careful restoration. A short way off, the MIM is a private mineral museum whose collection of thousands of specimens is quietly one of the finest in the world, a reminder that Beirut's museums are not all about art and history. Between them, and with the National Museum of Lebanon's Phoenician and Roman antiquities nearby, you can trace the country's story from the deep geological past to the present in a single day. These are institutions worth planning around, both for what they hold and for what they say about a city that keeps rebuilding its cultural life.

Music & Culture Festivals

Baalbeck International FestivalBaalbekJul AugThe Baalbeck International Festival is the reason to be in Baalbek in summer, the oldest cultural festival in the Middle East, staged since 1956 among the Roman temples of the ancient city of Heliopolis. Through July and August the sanctuary fills with music in the evenings: opera and classical orchestras, jazz, Arabic music, dance and theatre performed against the floodlit columns of the Temple of Jupiter and inside the Temple of Bacchus, one of the most complete Roman temples standing anywhere. The setting does much of the work, a UNESCO World Heritage site of colossal stonework that dwarfs the stage built within it, and the programme moves from international headliners to Lebanese folklore evenings. Even outside festival season the temple complex is one of the great archaeological sites of the Roman world and open to visit by day. For a few weeks each summer, though, it becomes a concert hall of a kind that exists nowhere else, and that is the reason to plan a trip around a performance.

Paragliding

HarissaApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep OctHarissa is where you fly the Lebanese coast. The ridge above Jounieh Bay, best known for the Our Lady of Lebanon shrine and the funicular that climbs to it, sits at around 650 metres straight above the sea, which makes it a natural launch for tandem paragliding. A flight lifts off the hillside near Harissa or neighbouring Ghosta, tracks out over the curve of Jounieh Bay with the marinas and the coast road below, and drops slowly back toward the water, often passing close to the great statue on the ridge. No experience is needed, since you fly strapped to a professional pilot, and the flights are short and gentle rather than extreme, which makes this an easy first taste of free flight for most people. Half an hour north of Beirut, it is the most accessible airborne view of the mountains-meet-sea landscape that defines this stretch of coast.

Scuba Diving

BatrounJun Jul Aug Sep OctBatroun is the home of Lebanese diving. The old Phoenician town on the northern coast has some of the clearest water in the country, and its dive centres run out to a mix of reef, cave and wreck that most people never associate with the eastern Mediterranean. The signature dives are wrecks, among them the Alice B, a ship sunk off the coast in the 1980s and now lying at around 35 metres, and the Souffleur, a French submarine lost in the Second World War at similar depth, along with cave sites such as the Selaata air cave. Water is warm and calm through the summer, visibility opens up off the north coast, and the shore and marina make an easy base with the diving a short boat ride out. Casual snorkelers and first-timers can try the water off the reefs, while the deeper wrecks give certified divers a reason to come back. It is the natural place to put Lebanon underwater on the map.

Skiing & Snowsports

Mzaar KfardebianJan Feb Mar DecMzaar is the largest ski resort in the Middle East and the reason people say you can ski above Beirut in the morning and swim in the Mediterranean the same afternoon. It sits on the western slopes of Mount Lebanon about an hour from the capital, with roughly 80 kilometres of pistes spread across three linked sectors, Refuge, Jonction and the newer Wardeh, between about 1,850 and 2,465 metres. The terrain is broad and mostly open above the treeline, with gentle beginner ground at Wardeh and longer intermediate runs dropping off the higher ridges, and on a clear day the views run all the way down to the sea. It fills at weekends with Beirutis up for the day, giving the resort a social, sunny character as much as a sporting one. This is the anchor of Lebanese snowsports and the natural place to learn or to ski a few relaxed days at altitude with the coast in sight.

Trekking / Hiking

Qadisha ValleyApr May Jun Sep Oct NovThe Qadisha Valley is Lebanon's finest walking country and the clearest place to see the mountains that gave the country its cedars. A deep gorge cut below the town of Bsharri, it has sheltered Christian monastic communities for well over a thousand years, and the trail down its floor and along its terraces links rock-cut monasteries and hermitages such as Deir Mar Lichaa and Qannoubine, many still tended, with the river running beneath. Above the valley head stands the Cedars of God, one of the last old groves of the Lebanon cedar at around 1,900 metres, some of the trees many centuries old. The whole valley and grove are a UNESCO World Heritage site, and long-distance walkers pick up sections of the Lebanon Mountain Trail here. Bsharri itself, birthplace of the writer Kahlil Gibran, makes the natural base. Whether you drop into the gorge for a day or link villages over several, this is deep mountain and monastic Lebanon on foot.

Wine / Spirits Education

Bekaa ValleyMay Jun Sep OctThe Bekaa Valley is where Lebanese wine is grown and the best place to understand it. A high plain around 900 to 1,000 metres between two mountain ranges, it has long hot days, cool nights and good drainage, and it holds most of the country's vineyards along with estates that have been making wine since the 19th century. Two of them anchor a visit: Chateau Ksara near Zahle, founded by Jesuit priests in 1857 and the oldest and largest winery in the country, with tastings that end in two kilometres of Roman-cut cellar tunnels, and Chateau Kefraya in the West Bekaa, a benchmark producer whose terraced vineyards climb the foothills of Mount Barouk. Between them you can taste the Cinsault, Cabernet, Syrah and Grenache blends that define Lebanese reds, the crisp whites, and the aniseed spirit arak that is distilled here too. Tours run through vineyards, cellars and tasting rooms, often ending over a long Lebanese lunch among the vines. It is a compact, deep introduction to one of the oldest wine cultures on earth.

Best months at a glance

	J	F	M	A	M	J	J	A	S	O	N	D
Culinary
Museums
Music Festivals
Paragliding
Scuba Diving
Skiing
Trekking
Wine & Spirits

Upcoming events in Lebanon

Baalbeck International FestivalJul 8, 2026 – Aug 18, 2026expected