The Forest of God is what's left after five thousand years of logging. Once the cedars covered most of the Lebanese mountains; the timber built Solomon's Temple, the Pharaoh's funeral boats, and the navies of Tyre and Sidon. Today the grove on Mount Makmal — about 1,900 metres up, in a high glacial cirque above Bcharre — holds roughly 375 trees, four of which are over a thousand years old and a handful of which may approach three millennia.
The site is small (about 102 hectares) but extraordinary. The oldest cedars are vast, low-spreading trees with trunks several metres across and twisted, sculptural limbs that nearly touch the ground. A network of paths winds through the grove; allow an hour to walk it slowly. UNESCO inscribed the site in 1998 and the Maronite Patriarchate has owned and protected it since the Ottoman period. Entry is by ticket through one of two gates — the lower one near the souvenir stalls, the upper one further up the ski road.