Tripoli Audio Tours

Tripoli is Lebanon's second city and its most historically dense: the old city holds the highest concentration of Mamluk architecture outside Cairo, a legacy of the 1289 conquest by Sultan Qalawun that replaced the Crusader city with a new urban grid of mosques, madrasas, hammams, and souks. The Mansouri Great Mosque was converted from a Crusader cathedral, the minaret rising where a bell tower stood. The Khan al-Saboun (Soap Khan) has been a soap market since the 14th century, where blocks of olive oil soap are stacked to the ceiling and the smell is nothing like any factory soap you have encountered.

The Citadel of Tripoli, the largest Crusader castle in Lebanon, sits on a hill above the old city.

Below it, the souks of the old medina run in specializations that have not changed in centuries: a street of cobblers, a street of gold, a street of fabrics. The 1906 Ottoman clock tower at the center was a gift to the city after the Young Turk Revolution and was restored in 1992. Oscar Niemeyer designed the Rachid Karami International Fair complex for a 1975 exposition that never opened because the civil war began that same year; the vast unfinished pavilions on the outskirts of the city are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site in a state of beautiful suspended animation.