Beirut Audio Tours

Beirut has been destroyed and rebuilt at least seven times over its three-thousand-year history as a Phoenician port, a Roman city, and a medieval trading hub. The 15-year civil war that ended in 1990 was only the most recent destruction, and the city that rebuilt from it had the restaurants, the nightlife, and the creative energy that earned it the title Paris of the Middle East before the war, only amplified. Then the port explosion of August 4, 2020, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, devastated the Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael neighborhoods that had become the center of the city's post-war cultural renaissance.

Walking Beirut now means walking several cities at once.

The rebuilt downtown Solidere district is polished limestone and restored Ottoman architecture, beautiful and slightly unreal. Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael, still partially in ruins two years after the explosion, have galleries and bars operating out of damaged buildings as residents refuse to leave. Hamra in West Beirut has the intellectual cafes and bookshops that survived everything. Gemmayze's Rue Gouraud, a single street of 19th-century stone houses, is one of the most architecturally rich streets in the Arab world. Lebanese food is among the best in the world, a fact that Beirutis mention as a point of pride but rarely need to argue.