Lebanon

🇱🇧 Lebanon

Bcharre

Bcharre (also spelled Bcharré or Bsharri — Arabic: بشري, population 5,000 — the mountain town in the Qadisha Valley (the "Holy Valley" in Aramaic) in the North Governorate of Lebanon, at 1,400m altitude in the northern Lebanon Mountains) is one of the most sacred and most beautiful landscapes in the Middle East: the hometown of Kahlil Gibran (Gibran Khalil Gibran — the Lebanese-American poet, philosopher and painter (1883–1931): the author of "The Prophet" (1923) — the most widely sold book in the history of publishing after the Bible and the Quran (The Prophet has been continuously in print since 1923 and has been translated into more than 100 languages): the Gibran Museum (housed in a 7th-century monastery carved into the rock of the Qadisha Valley cliff face — the most important literary museum in Lebanon and one of the most beautiful museum locations in the world)), the gateway to the Cedars of God (Arz al-Rab — the ancient cedar forest that has been sacred since the earliest recorded history: the cedars are mentioned in the "Epic of Gilgamesh" (the oldest written story in the world: the Sumerian tablets of 2100 BCE that describe the hero Gilgamesh cutting the Cedar of Lebanon with his companion Enkidu — the "Cedar Mountain" of the Epic of Gilgamesh is the Lebanon Mountain range): the 375 remaining ancient cedars in the protected grove at 1,900m altitude, some estimated to be 3,000 years old), and the gateway to the Qadisha Valley (the UNESCO World Heritage Site — the deep gorge carved by the Qadisha River through the limestone of the North Lebanon Mountains, the site of the earliest Christian monasteries in the world (some dating from the 5th century CE) and the historic refuge of the Maronite Christian community of Lebanon).

🇱🇧 Lebanon

Beirut

Beirut (بيروت — the capital and largest city of Lebanon, population 2.4 million in the greater metropolitan area) is one of the most complex and contradictory cities in the world: simultaneously the party capital of the Arab world (the nightlife runs from Thursday to Sunday without pause), a city still physically marked by the 1975–1990 Civil War and the catastrophic 2020 port explosion (the August 4, 2020 ammonium nitrate explosion at the Port of Beirut — one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, equivalent to 1.1 kilotons of TNT, which killed 218 people, injured 7,000, destroyed 300,000 apartments and caused $15 billion in damage), and one of the richest food cultures in the Middle East. Lebanese cuisine is arguably the finest and most internationally influential in the Arab world: the mezze culture (the tradition of sharing 20–30 small dishes as an entire meal — hummus, tabbouleh, fattoush, kibbeh, labneh, baba ghanoug, muhamara, sambousek — each dish a world of its own), the grilled meats (kafta, shish taouk, lahm meshwi), the seafood from the Mediterranean, and the Lebanese breakfast (the most extensive and beautiful breakfast tradition in the Arab world).