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Capital: Beirut
Population: 5 million+
Language: Arabic, French, English
1 – Citadel of Raymond de Saint-Gilles (also above)
The Citadel of Raymond de Saint-Gilles stands on a hill above the Abu Ali river in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, begun around 1102–03 by Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse, as a siege castle he called Mont Pèlerin, though he died in 1105 and the city held out until 1109.
Little of the Crusader work survives at the Citadel of Raymond de Saint-Gilles, which was rebuilt by the Mamluks and later by the Ottomans under Suleiman the Magnificent, while below it Tripoli has the richest Mamluk architecture in Lebanon, with mosques, madrasas, khans, hammams and souqs.
When the Crusaders took Tripoli in 1109, the celebrated library of its Banu Ammar rulers, the Dar al-Ilm, was plundered and dispersed, though medieval claims that it held millions of volumes are thought to be exaggerated.
2 – Jeita Grotto
Jeita Grotto is a pair of limestone caves in the Nahr al-Kalb valley about 18 km north of Beirut, carved by an underground river, with about 9 km of passages surveyed, and in 1836 the American missionary William Thomson is said to have fired a gun inside to judge its size from the echo.
The lower cave at Jeita Grotto is visited by boat and opened in 1958, while the upper galleries, discovered that year, opened in 1969 and hold one of the longest known stalactites, about 8.2 m.
The river in Jeita Grotto supplies water to over a million people in and around Beirut, and during the civil war the caves were closed in 1978 and used to store munitions, before reopening in 1995.
3 – Zahlé
Zahlé is the capital of the Bekaa Governorate, about 55 km east of Beirut on the Berdawni river, and it has long been known as the Bride of the Bekaa.
Zahlé is best known for the open-air restaurants along the Berdawni, where long meals of mezze are served with arak, the aniseed spirit of the Levant.
Winemaking in Lebanon goes back thousands of years, and Château Ksara outside Zahlé, the country’s oldest winery, was founded by Jesuits in 1857, its wine kept in nearly 2 km of Roman-era caves found in 1898.
4 – Temple of Jupiter, Baalbek
The Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, in the northern Bekaa valley, was the largest temple in the Roman world, begun in the 1st century BC and largely finished under Nero, in a city the Greeks and Romans called Heliopolis, the City of the Sun.
Six of the 54 columns of the Temple of Jupiter stand about 20 m high, beside the Temple of Bacchus, one of the best-preserved Roman temples anywhere, and the small round Temple of Venus, while a music festival has been held in the ruins since 1956.
The platform of the Temple of Jupiter includes the Trilithon, three blocks about 19 m long and about 800 tonnes each, and in 2014 the German Archaeological Institute found a block in the nearby quarry estimated at about 1,650 tonnes, which it describes as the largest known stone block from antiquity.
5 – Sidon Sea Castle
Sidon Sea Castle stands on a small island off Sidon, one of the great Phoenician cities, joined to the shore by a causeway about 80 m long, and the Crusaders built it in 1227–28, reputedly over a shrine to the Phoenician god Melqart.
Sidon Sea Castle has two towers, with a small domed mosque added later, and behind it the old town of Sidon has a souq, a soap museum in a 17th-century soap factory and the Khan al-Franj, an Ottoman-era caravanserai leased to French merchants.
Sidon Sea Castle was built partly from Roman columns laid crosswise through its walls to bind the masonry, and the emir Fakhr al-Din II restored it in the 17th century, while in June 1941, during the Second World War, Australian troops took Sidon from Vichy French forces.
6 – Byblos
Byblos, Jbeil in Arabic, lies on the coast about 35 km north of Beirut and is often counted among the oldest continuously inhabited towns in the world, first settled as a fishing village around 7,000 years ago, and UNESCO listed it in 1984.
At Byblos, a Crusader castle overlooks the excavated ancient city, with its old walls, the Temple of the Obelisks, a Roman theatre and the royal tombs, beside a small harbour.
The Greeks are thought to have named papyrus after Byblos, the port through which it reached them, giving the word for books and so “Bible”, and the sarcophagus of King Ahiram, found here in 1923, carries an inscription of about 1000 BC that is the earliest known example of the fully developed Phoenician alphabet.
7 – The Cedars of God and the Kadisha Valley
The Cedars of God, Horsh Arz el-Rab, grow above the Kadisha Valley near Bsharri in northern Lebanon, among the last remnants of the forests that once covered these mountains, and UNESCO listed the valley and the grove together in 1998.
The Kadisha Valley holds monasteries cut into its cliffs, among them Qannoubine, seat of the Maronite patriarchs from the 15th to the 19th century, and Qozhaya, whose monks printed a Psalter in Syriac and Garshuni in 1610, often described as the first book printed in Lebanon.
The cedar of Lebanon, the tree on the national flag, has been cut for thousands of years, for Phoenician ships, Egyptian temples and, by tradition, Solomon’s Temple, and the few hundred old trees in the Cedars of God survive partly behind a wall Queen Victoria paid for in 1876 to keep out goats.
8 – Beirut
Beirut has been settled for thousands of years, and under Augustus it became the Roman colony of Berytus, whose law school was so renowned that Justinian called the city the “mother of laws”, until the earthquake, tsunami and fire of 9 July 551 destroyed it.
Beirut’s sights include the Roman baths downtown, Martyrs’ Square, the seafront corniche and the National Museum, whose staff saved its collection during the civil war by encasing the largest pieces in reinforced concrete and moving smaller objects to safety.
Lebanon marks its independence from France on 22 November, the day in 1943 when the French released its arrested leaders, and in 1958 Beirut was the base of UNOGIL, the UN observer group that became the first UN mission for Ireland’s Defence Forces, with 50 Irish officers serving.
9 – Tyre
Tyre, on the southern coast of Lebanon, was among the greatest of the Phoenician cities, a sea power whose colonists founded Carthage, traditionally in 814 BC, and it was an island until 332 BC, when Alexander the Great besieged it for about seven months and built a causeway out to it from the mainland.
Tyre’s Al-Bass site has a monumental arch, an aqueduct, a vast necropolis and a Roman hippodrome about 480 m long, while the Al-Mina site on the old island has colonnaded streets and baths, and UNESCO listed Tyre in 1984.
Tyre gave its name to Tyrian purple, the costly dye made from murex sea snails, and in 1978 Ireland sent a battalion to serve with the UN force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, in the hills south-east of Tyre.
10 – Anjar
Anjar lies in the Bekaa valley near the Syrian border, a city built under the Umayyad caliph al-Walid I in the early 8th century on a rectangular plan, with walls and 40 towers, and UNESCO listed it in 1984.
At Anjar two colonnaded main streets cross at a four-sided tetrapylon, and the ruins around them include palaces, a mosque and baths.
Anjar was abandoned after Caliph Ibrahim was defeated by his rival Marwan II in 744, and in 1939 Armenian refugees from Musa Dagh settled beside the site, while from the 1940s Lebanon’s Directorate General of Antiquities uncovered the Umayyad city, revealing the main palace in 1949.