A weekend on the north coast: Byblos, Batroun and the road between
Two coastal towns forty minutes apart, and how to spend a weekend on them without doing the same day twice.
· 6 min read
Byblos and Batroun are close enough that people treat them as one destination and different enough that doing so wastes both. Byblos is older, denser and more visited — a citadel, a harbour, a souk that has been a souk for a very long time. Batroun is lower, looser and later; it is the one that stays up.
The road between them takes about forty minutes on a clear day and considerably longer on a summer Sunday afternoon, when everyone in Beirut has the same idea. If you are doing both in one weekend, the useful shape is Byblos in daylight and Batroun after dark, not the other way round.
Byblos, in daylight
The old town is small and rewards walking rather than planning. The citadel and the harbour are the two fixed points; everything else is the stone lanes between them, which are pleasant to be lost in and impossible to be lost in for long.
Go early if you want the souk without the crowd. By midday in season it is shoulder to shoulder, and the harbour restaurants — which are genuinely good — stop being a place you can sit down at without waiting.
Eating in Byblos
Pulled from the catalogue now, so this list reflects what is currently published rather than what was true when this was written.
Batroun, after dark
Batroun does not really begin until the evening. The old souk is worth an hour in daylight and the Phoenician sea wall is worth the walk, but the town earns its reputation between about nine and very late.
It is also more compact than it looks. Most of what you would want is within a few streets of the sea, which means one parking decision rather than several.
Batroun after dark
If you have a third day
Both towns sit below the mountains, and the drive inland changes the weather within twenty minutes. If the coast is hot, going up is the obvious move, and the north has more of it than most people use.