Cedars of God

The Cedars of God — Arz el-Rab — are about 8 km east of Bcharre on the road up toward the Mzaar ski area, at an altitude of around 2,000 m. The surviving grove is small but the individual trees are extraordinary: a few are over a thousand years old, with massive gnarled trunks and broad horizontal canopies.

A short loop trail winds through the forest, and there's a small chapel built among the trees from cedar wood. Go in the morning before the tour buses arrive, and ideally in winter or early spring when there's snow on the branches — it's then that you understand why this image ended up on a national flag. Entrance is a few thousand Lebanese pounds.

things to do sight
A story
The cedar of Lebanon appears on the country's flag, and the timber from these mountains built the temples of Jerusalem, the palaces of Babylon, and the ships of the Phoenicians — for three thousand years the cedar forests were cut and exported. By the early twentieth century barely a few hundred mature trees were left. This single small grove above Bcharre, with around 375 trees, is what survived.