Fascinating Lebanon

Lebanon has quite unfairly fallen out of the spotlight when it comes to travel. The media images of the civil war in the 1980s and 1990s are probably still fresh in our minds. Yet Lebanon remains a beautiful and culturally fascinating destination! The protests of 2019 and the explosion of 2020 have done nothing to change that.

That’s why we’ll start offering trips to Lebanon again as soon as the situation in the region has stabilised.

Through a Lebanese family we’re friends with, I had the opportunity to visit the country and meet its lively and warm-hearted people. Of course, on some street corners you can still see the scars of the civil war, but much has long since been restored or was never destroyed in the first place. It’s still there – that French flair combined with oriental charm for which Beirut became so famous in the 1960s – in the people, in the mix of languages, and in the magnificent city architecture. There are wildly romantic mountain valleys with early Christian monasteries, Roman temple complexes on the grandest scale ever built, churches of various denominations and mosques side by side, exciting contemporary art, chic shopping streets, trendy bars, and medieval Mediterranean port towns with 7,000 years of history. And yes, alongside and amidst all this cultural richness, there is also poverty and a scarcity of resources, as well as many refugees from neighbouring countries – issues that the Lebanese have to cope with. Discover the fascinating aspects of this country on the cusp of change on our 8-day tour; with its incredibly rich history stretching from antiquity to the present day, it is absolutely worth a visit.