Byblos Travel Guide

Byblos — Jbeil to the Lebanese — has a fair claim to being the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth, lived in without a break for some seven thousand years. It was here, trading papyrus and cedar with the wider Mediterranean, that the Phoenicians refined the alphabet that nearly every Western script descends from. You can stand among ruins layered Neolithic on Phoenician on Roman, then climb the squat 12th-century Crusader castle for a view that takes in the whole stack of history at once.

What makes Byblos linger, though, is how gently it wears all this. The old souk is a warren of honey-stone lanes opening onto a small fishing harbour where wooden boats still bob beside seafood restaurants. An easy 40 minutes up the coast from Beirut, it's the perfect slow half-day: ancient ruins in the morning, grilled fish and arak by the water in the afternoon.