Beirut

9:00 AM — Pickup from your Beirut hotel Your friendly driver meets you at your hotel and heads east on the Damascus highway — climbing through the Lebanese mountains as the beautiful Bekaa Valley opens dramatically below. First stop is Anjar, about an hour away.

Anjar

Anjar — a beautifully preserved Umayyad city Arrive at one of Lebanon's most fascinating and most undervisited archaeological sites — the Umayyad ruins of Anjar, the only surviving example of a complete Umayyad palatial city in the entire Levant. Built in the early 8th century by Caliph Walid I — the same visionary ruler who commissioned the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem — the city was abandoned just decades after its construction and never rebuilt, leaving it wonderfully preserved. Colonnaded streets dividing the city into four quarters, a grand palace with over 40 towers, a mosque and bathhouses — all still standing in the middle of the Bekaa plain. A genuinely impressive and surprisingly accessible site that your driver brings to life with ease.