A city that keeps rebuilding its museums and galleries after every catastrophe, and one of the most serious art scenes in the region. Check travel advice before you go.
A white Ottoman-Venetian villa of 1912 left to the city by Nicolas Sursock. Badly damaged in the 2020 port explosion, it reopened in 2023, with modern Lebanese art and serious contemporary shows.
A private collection of more than 2,000 minerals from around the world, presented like jewellery in the dark.
Lebanon's future museum of modern and contemporary art, built on Université Saint-Joseph land opposite the National Museum, to show for the first time the national collection kept for decades in ministries and the presidential palace. The building is due to open in 2029; until then BeMA shows the collection in pop-up exhibitions around the country.
Andrée Sfeir-Semler opened her Beirut space in 2005, after twenty years in Germany, on the fourth floor of a former warehouse in the old port quarantine district. Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari and Etel Adnan, the artists who defined Lebanese contemporary art, have shown here.
Named after Janine Rubeiz, who founded the cultural centre Dar el Fan in 1967; her daughter Nadine Begdache turned it into a gallery in the early 1990s. Lebanese modern and contemporary art, by the sea.
Lebanon's archaeological collection, from the Phoenicians to the Mamluks. During the civil war, the staff encased the large pieces in concrete to protect them; a short film shows the rescue.
The Barakat building, a 1920s yellow villa on the old Green Line, used by snipers during the civil war and kept with its scars as a museum of memory.
One of the gallerists who built the Lebanese modern and contemporary market, in a former cinema.
A non-profit space for contemporary art founded in 2009, since 2019 in the SAFE storage building in the industrial district by the Beirut River. Exhibitions, performances, screenings and workshops, with artists from Lebanon and the region at the centre.
The Beirut branch (2007) of a Munich gallery founded in 1972 by Naila Kettaneh Kunigk. Its building, by the architect Jean-Marc Bonfils, was wrecked in the 2020 port explosion, which killed him; the gallery reopened in 2021.
Rooms, ruins and curiosities: the city's other museum.
The concrete shell of an unfinished 1960s cinema, the Dome City Center, by Joseph Philippe Karam. A survivor of the civil war, and a symbol argued over ever since.
A hotel that opened in 1974 and became a front line in 1975. It still stands, gutted, facing the Phoenicia.
Beirut's oldest church, with a crypt museum showing the layers of the city beneath it: Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine.
The Saint-Nicolas and Vendôme staircases between Achrafieh and Gemmayzeh, with old houses, plants and the art of the neighbourhood.
Saloua Raouda Choucair (1916–2017), the pioneer of Arab abstraction, made modular sculptures whose parts fit together like the verses of an Arabic poem. Her foundation opened on her birthday in June 2024, in the pine forests of the Metn, in a building by Karim Bekdache Studio: storage and exhibition space at once, with more than 500 works and her archives.
A 34-storey concrete tower begun in 1974 as the city's tallest office block. It never opened: the civil war turned it into a sniper post, and it has stood empty ever since, one of the most charged buildings in the city.
A 19th-century villa on the Sursock street hill, holding the Audi family's collection of Roman and Byzantine floor mosaics, laid out room by room.
Oscar Niemeyer's unfinished Rachid Karami International Fair, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2023, about 90 minutes north.
The Gibran Museum, in the monastery where Khalil Gibran is buried, above the Qadisha Valley.
A 19th-century emir's palace, with Byzantine mosaics in its stables.
Sursock Museum at opening → down the Saint-Nicolas stairs to Gemmayzeh → lunch → the National Museum → Beit Beirut → sunset on the Corniche.