By Mayté Rodríguez Cedillo   ·  Luxury Travel   ·   BajaTraveler.com

I didn’t plan to stay two months. No one does. You arrive in Beirut with a return ticket and an itinerary, and then — somewhere between the first plate of mezze and the first conversation with a stranger who insists on walking you to your destination — the city quietly rearranges your plans. Lebanon is that kind of place. It reaches into you before you realize it’s happening, and by the time you notice, you don’t particularly want to leave. I need to mention that I flew EMIRATES to visit Egypt, Dubai and Jordan while I was there – and it needs to be said, EMIRATES is a wonderful airline.

What surprised me most was how familiar Lebanon felt. The warmth of strangers who become friends in an afternoon. The laughter that carries across restaurant terraces late into the night. The generosity that doesn’t wait to be asked. Social Life is everywhere. Beirut pulses with the same kind of joyful, defiant energy I know from home in México — a people who have lived through enormous hardship and answered it not with bitterness, but with an almost stubborn insistence on beauty and celebration. I left with new friendships I still carry with me, faces I still follow on Facebook, people who remind me, every time they appear in my feed, that human warmth has no borders.

A City That Refuses to Apologize
Beirut is loud, layered and impossible to summarize. The nightlife is extraordinary — not in the polished, predictable way of resort cities, but in the way of a place that genuinely knows how to live. Restaurant terraces fill at midnight. The shopping is unabashedly European: beautiful boutiques, curated stores, a sophistication in the streets that catches you off guard. And yet around every corner, the city’s history asserts itself — bullet holes preserved in building facades, not as wounds but as witnesses. Lebanon keeps them there deliberately, so no one forgets. So no generation inherits the illusion that peace is permanent or that it came free.

The St. Georges Hotel, on the waterfront in Ain El-Mreisseh, embodies this contradiction perfectly. Built in 1934 and once the most glamorous address in the Middle East — Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot, the Shah of Iran all passed through its doors — it was gutted by the civil war and became, for decades, a haunting silhouette against the marina. I was drawn to it precisely because of that history. Standing there, you understand Beirut: a city that has endured the unimaginable and still insists on being magnificent.

For those who want to understand how Beirut’s elite once lived — and how they chose to preserve that life — the Robert Mouawad Private Museum is essential. Housed in the neo-Gothic Henri Pharaon Palace in the Zokak el-Blat quarter, it is one of those places that feels more like an invitation into a private world than a conventional museum visit. The collection spans Byzantine icons, Mamluk ceramics, Roman funerary steles, Islamic carved woodwork, and extraordinary jewelry — including pieces from the Mouawad diamond family, one of the world’s most celebrated jewelry houses. The mansion itself, with its painted wooden panels and marble carvings, is as much the exhibit as anything inside it. A visit here is not optional. It is, in every sense, a privilege.

Byblos: The Oldest Harbor in the World
Forty kilometers north of Beirut, the ancient port city of Byblos — known locally as Jbeil — is one of the most continuously inhabited places on earth, settled since at least 5000 BC and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Coming from a country with deep pre-Columbian roots, I felt an instant kinship with the layers of civilizations piled here: Phoenician temples, Roman columns, Crusader castle walls, cobblestone streets still navigated by fishing boats returning with the morning catch.

The seafood in Byblos is reason enough to make the journey. At the ancient harbor, restaurants serve whatever came out of the Mediterranean that morning — grilled, prepared simply, with views of the water that haven’t changed in a thousand years. I ate there more than once. You would too.

Tripoli, the Shouf Mountains, and the Road South
Lebanon is a small country with an extraordinary density of history. From Tripoli in the north — where the medieval Mamluk souks are among the finest in the Middle East and the sweets are legendary across the Arab world — to the far south, the road tells the story of every civilization that ever wanted this strip of coast. In Tripoli, we wandered through the covered markets for hours: spices, textiles, handcrafted goods, the scent of orange blossom soap. The Citadel of Raymond de Saint-Gilles watches over it all from a hilltop, a Crusader castle so massive it seems impossible that human hands built it. And then there is the Khan al-Saboun — the Soap Khan — a 17th-century caravanserai in the heart of the old city where the Badr Hassoun family has been producing handmade olive oil soap for more than 800 years. Walking in, the scent hits you first: olive oil, aromatic herbs, the particular sweetness of something made slowly and by hand. A living museum, a family dynasty, and one of the most authentic places I visited in all of Lebanon. I left with more soap than I could carry.

Before heading south, we spent a full day in the Shouf mountains — one of the most rewarding days of the entire trip. The circuit begins at Beiteddine, where Emir Bachir Chehab II built his palace between 1788 and 1818 with the help of Italian architects.

The result is one of the finest examples of 19th-century Lebanese architecture in existence: grand colonnaded courtyards, intricately carved stone, mosaic-covered halls, and terraced gardens that descend into the valley below. The palace has served as an Ottoman government seat, a French mandate office, and Lebanon’s presidential summer residence — and today it opens its doors to visitors who can still feel the weight of all that history moving through its corridors.

I also stopped at the Mexican Embassy in Beirut — a moment that, in the middle of two months abroad, felt unexpectedly moving. There is something about seeing your country’s flag in a foreign city that reminds you who you are.

Then came Moussa Castle, just down the road between Deir El Qamar and Beiteddine — a 3,500-square-meter medieval fortress built entirely by one man, Moussa Abdel Karim Al-Maamari, who spent sixty years constructing it stone by stone after a girl he loved told him to come back when he owned a palace. It is furnished with wax figures depicting scenes from his life, a remarkable weaponry collection, and the particular kind of beauty that only obsession can produce. You leave Beiteddine understanding a dynasty. You leave Moussa Castle understanding a man.

From there, we drove further south toward the Israeli border — as close as the road allows. At Tyre, just twelve miles from the frontier, the Roman ruins at the Al-Bass archaeological site take you somewhere else entirely: a hippodrome that once held twenty thousand spectators, colonnaded streets paved with mosaics, an arch of triumph standing over a city that has been continuously fought over for three thousand years. I had seen photographs. Nothing prepares you for the scale. It felt, in the best possible way, like standing in the middle of a sentence that history hadn’t finished writing.

Annaya: Faith in the Mountains
No journey through Lebanon is complete without the mountains, and no visit to the mountains is complete without Annaya. Perched at 1,200 meters in the Byblos district, the Monastery of Saint Maron is the resting place of Saint Charbel Makhlouf — Lebanon’s first canonized saint, a Maronite hermit-monk who died in 1898 and whose tomb has drawn pilgrims from every religion ever since. Christians, Muslims, Druze: they all come here. That tells you something essential about what Saint Charbel represents in Lebanon — not just a saint, but a symbol of a country’s capacity for coexistence.

I went there on Sundays. The mountain setting, the pine forests, the silence that settles over you as you approach the monastery — there is something there that is very difficult to describe and very easy to feel. If you go to Lebanon and you skip Annaya, you will have missed something that stays with you long after the trip ends. I know, because it stayed with me.

✦ BAJATRAVELER® TAKEAWAY
Lebanon is not a destination for the timid, and that is precisely why it rewards those who go. In two months, I found a country of extraordinary beauty, ancient history at every turn, seafood worthy of devotion, and a people whose warmth rivals anything I have known. The friendships I made there I carry still. Go before the rest of the world rediscovers it — and it will.

Once the geo political climate improves, Plan Your Lebanon Journey
Lebanon is best experienced with a private guide who knows both the history and the current landscape. Middle East Airlines operates direct flights from Mexico City via connections, and several luxury operators offer curated itineraries through Beirut, Byblos, Tripoli, and the south. Visas are processed on arrival for Mexican and Canadian passport holders.  

→ Contact your BajaTraveler® Travel Advisor for curated Lebanon itineraries