Beirut

9:00 AM — Departure from Beirut Your knowledgeable English-speaking driver meets you at your Beirut hotel and heads north into the Lebanese mountains — the landscape climbing steeply as you leave the coast behind and head toward the Adonis Valley and the first waterfall of the day.

Afqa Waterfall

Arrive at one of Lebanon's most dramatic and most mythologically significant natural sites — the Afqa waterfall, which bursts from a cave high in the sheer limestone cliffs of the Adonis Valley and plunges down to form the source of the Adonis River below. In ancient times this was a sacred site dedicated to Adonis and Astarte — the Phoenician gods of love and fertility — and the cave from which the water flows was considered one of the entrances to the underworld. Today the waterfall is at its most powerful in spring when snowmelt swells the flow to a thundering cascade, the spray visible from far below. Walk to the base of the falls and feel the scale of the cliffs above you — one of those places in Lebanon that makes you understand why the Phoenicians thought the gods lived here.