The Shouf Travel Guide

The Shouf is Lebanon's green mountain heart, and the antidote to anyone who pictures the country as only coast and city. Its centrepiece is the Shouf Cedar Reserve, the largest nature reserve in Lebanon, protecting a quarter of the country's surviving cedars — the same trees on the national flag, some of them over a thousand years old. Walk the trails through the Barouk and Maasser groves and you're among living things that were saplings before the Crusaders arrived.

This is also the Druze heartland, with a culture and hospitality all its own. Two showpiece towns anchor a visit: Beiteddine, whose early-19th-century palace is a masterpiece of Levantine craftsmanship and hosts a celebrated summer arts festival, and the honey-coloured old town of Deir el-Qamar. Cool, scented with cedar, and deeply local, the Shouf is the part of Lebanon that travellers least expect and remember most.