Outdoor & Sports in Beirut, Lebanon

Danielle Abi Saab, Owner and Instructor at Union Square Yoga
Anything you can think of you can find somewhere, and its happening more and more. Theres more climbing, there more biking, theres kayaking.

Nizar Hani – Scientific Coordinator at Shouf Cedar Reserve
You can do mountain biking, you can do hiking, you can do bird watching. You can swim in the rivers in Lebanon as well as in the Mediterranean sea. In a very short time you can do many activities, you know Lebanon is a very small country.

Danielle Abi Saab
The various landscapes that exist within one small space provide these many different opportunities. And because you can do a lot of those in a day, people take advantage and do it.

Nadine Weber – President of Lebanese Mountain Association (LMTA)
Lebanon became more of an outdoor destination for ecotourism because of its mountains, the beaches, the rivers the sea. What makes Lebanon unique it’s the diversity in the nature, in the landscape, in the villages and even in people.

Nizar Hani
All this diversity in ecosystems giving Lebanon diversity in flora. Lets say our list of flowers is 2,800 in comparison with UK, they have 2,100.

Nadine Weber
Whenever you go hiking on the mountains every 10 minutes you see a different landscape. Sometimes you see the forest and juniper trees, the cedar trees.

Nizar Hani
When you read more about this history of the cedar forest and when you go to walk there you feel yourself in a different century.

Danielle Abi Saab
It’s important to be able to go inside and find something that can ground us, so yoga is definitely an option for that. Some people again will go and climb mountains, some people will go biking for three hours.

Theres a resonance when you’re out in nature, theres something automatic that happens almost is that you feel peaceful. Just sitting in front of a sun set sort of calms you down and creates a sense of connectedness so anything you’re going to be doing in the outdoors is of meditative quality.

Nizar Hani
We have 220 km of beaches because most of the country is on the Mediterranean sea. You can enjoy the Mediterranean sea activities.

Nadine Weber
Everything related to the beach. Water skiing, scuba diving, kite surfing, windsurfing…

Nizar Hani
You can do swimming in a very special places like Palm Island, a protected area, the beach in Tyre, another protected area. You can swim with the turtles, you can swim with a very rich marine biodiversity.

Nadine Weber
Well in Lebanon I feel lucky that I can do all kinds of activities and everything is so easy. Come to Lebanon because if you come once, you’ll come again and again and again.