Beirut

8:30 AM — Departure from Beirut Your private English-speaking driver collects you from your Beirut hotel and heads east on the Damascus highway, climbing through the Lebanese mountains before the Bekaa Valley opens dramatically below — a vast fertile plain stretching between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountain ranges, one of the most historically significant valleys in the entire Middle East.

Umayyad Ruins of Aanjar

Arrive at one of the most underrated and most historically significant archaeological sites in Lebanon — the Umayyad city of Anjar, the only surviving example of an Umayyad palatial city in the entire Levant. Built in the early 8th century by Caliph Walid I — the same ruler who commissioned the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem — Anjar was occupied for only a few decades before being abandoned following a political upheaval, leaving its streets, buildings, and monuments remarkably intact. Walking through Anjar today is like walking through a snapshot of 8th-century Islamic urban planning — colonnaded streets dividing the city into four quarters, a grand palace with over 40 towers, a mosque, bathhouses, and hundreds of decorated arches still standing. Your driver brings the extraordinary and little-known story of this UNESCO city to life.