Tyre Travel Guide

Tyre — Sour — was once the proud mistress of the Phoenician sea, the city that founded Carthage and supplied the ancient world with its rarest luxury, the purple dye worth more than gold. Today its UNESCO-listed ruins are among the most romantic in the Mediterranean: a colonnaded Roman road running toward the water, and at the Al-Bass site, one of the largest and best-preserved Roman hippodromes ever found, where you can pace the track that once carried chariots before crowds of thousands.

Tyre also keeps Lebanon's best public beaches — a long, soft, golden stretch that feels a world away from the country's rocky northern coast — and a still-active fishing harbour ringed with restaurants. An hour and a half south of Beirut, it's where a Lebanon trip slows right down: ruins in the morning, the sea all afternoon.