The Orontes passes through the centre of Hama in a series of broad curves, its banks lined with palm trees, gardens, and the parks surrounding the norias. In the evenings this stretch of riverside was one of the most pleasant places in the Syrian interior — families walking between the waterwheel parks, the sound of the creaking norias carrying across the water, tea-sellers working the promenades. The combination of flowing water, vertical wheels, and high garden walls gave the city a quality unlike anywhere else in Syria.
The river itself is one of the ancient waterways of the Middle East, flowing north from its source near Baalbek in Lebanon before turning west to reach the Mediterranean near Antioch (modern Antakya in Turkey) — a counterintuitive course that made it an obstacle to travellers moving through the region and a natural border in several ancient conflicts. Hama sits at a point where the river is wide enough to power large waterwheels but shallow enough to have been fordable in antiquity, which explains why the city grew here rather than at another point along the Orontes valley. The riverside gardens, fed by the noria aqueducts for centuries, remain the green core of the old city.