Waterfalls, cedars and red roofs.

Batroun is a caza, not just a town, and behind the beaches the land climbs fast into some of Lebanon's most spectacular country. Cedar forests, a chasm with a waterfall falling through it, and stone villages in the hills.

Tannourine

The Baatara Gorge waterfall

Also called the Three Bridges Chasm: a waterfall that drops two hundred and fifty five metres past three natural stone arches into a cavern in the rock. It runs fullest in spring, when the snowmelt comes down. One of the most astonishing sights in the country.

Set aside in 1999

The Tannourine cedars

A cedar forest reserve of some twelve square kilometres, where the great trees make up most of the canopy. Cedars have stood on these slopes since antiquity; the reserve is there so they still will in another thousand years.

The villages

Douma, Rachana and the hills

Douma sits at over a thousand metres, its red-tiled roofs a preserved picture of the old mountain Lebanon. Rachana is an open-air sculpture village shaped by the Basbous brothers, and dozens more towns ring the caza from the coast to the peaks.

The caza

Forty-plus villages ring the town.

Up the mountain

Twenty minutes from the beach.