The glamor of Beirut’s Corniche isn’t back yet, but the favorable exchange rate is bringing some expatriate Lebanese and tourists from neighboring countries to the city.
Image: Reuters
What has become of the sparkling metropolis of Beirut? The answer lies in the hinterland, where Lebanon has kept its beauty intact.
In Lebanon, tourism is a gamble. This has always been the case, even long before the pandemic transformed travel around the world. So if you ask Pierre Achkar, the chairman of the Association of Lebanese Hoteliers, how business is going these days, he replies politely: “May I start at the beginning?” And for him, 2011 begins at the beginning.
He tells what has happened since then, starting with the war in neighboring Syria, which closed the borders – including for those Jordanians who had previously crossed them every year on their way to their summer vacation. Jordanian families are often large, says Achkar, and taking the plane would have been unaffordable for them. So they set out in their cars until the war made the road impassable and they looked for other destinations far away from Lebanon. But a few years later things got even worse. In the course of growing political tensions between the Sunni Gulf states and Iran, whose ally, the Shiite Hezbollah, was gaining more and more influence in Lebanon, the Gulf states issued a travel warning for the small Mediterranean country. After that, about half a million tourists stayed away from these countries every year.