Sidon Travel Guide

Sidon — Saida — is a working Phoenician port that has never stopped working. Fishermen still mend nets below the Sea Castle, a small Crusader fortress marooned on an islet and joined to the shore by a stone causeway; it is the city's postcard, and at dusk, with the boats coming in, it earns the cliché. Behind it, the old town is a covered labyrinth of vaulted souks, the kind you get pleasurably lost in, emerging at the beautifully restored Khan el-Franj, a 17th-century caravanserai built for French merchants.

Don't leave without the Soap Museum, set in an old soapworks, which tells the unexpectedly fascinating story of Sidon's olive-oil soap trade. Half an hour south of Beirut and easily paired with Tyre, Sidon rewards travellers who like their history lived-in rather than roped off.