Beirut

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

Umayyad Ruins of Aanjar

Anjar — the ghost city nobody talks about Most people have never heard of Anjar. That is their loss — and your advantage. The Umayyad ruins of Anjar are 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 ruler who commissioned the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, then abandoned just decades later after a political upheaval and never reoccupied. Walking through Anjar today feels like walking through a frozen moment of 8th-century Islamic urban planning — 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. Most people visiting Baalbek drive straight past without knowing this is here. You will not make that mistake.