Taanayel
"The monks who built this place were farmers first and priests second, and you can taste the difference."
A Jesuit farm estate with artificial lakes and a nineteenth-century monastery, still making cheese and jam the way the monks taught it to.
Taanayel is a short detour off the main road between Chtaura and Zahle, and I nearly skipped it on the assumption that a farm estate wouldn’t have much to offer beyond a gift shop. I was wrong in a way I’m happy to admit. The Jesuits established this agricultural domain in the late nineteenth century, digging a pair of artificial lakes fed by the Litani basin’s underground water and planting poplar rows that now stand three stories tall along the water’s edge, and the whole property still functions as a working farm — dairy cattle, orchards, beehives — run to this day with the same practical, unshowy competence the order brought to it more than a century ago.
The lakes themselves are the reason to come even if you have no interest in the history. Still, reflective water framed by those tall poplars, with white egrets stalking the shallows and the Anti-Lebanon range rising blue in the distance — it is one of the more photogenic quiet corners of the whole valley, and on a weekday afternoon I had the walking paths almost entirely to myself. A family from Zahle was fishing off one bank with the patient indifference of people who come every week, and nobody seemed to be in any hurry to do anything.
The old monastery buildings house a small shop selling the estate’s own dairy — a soft, faintly sour farmhouse cheese called labneh baladi that I bought a jar of and finished within two days, along with fig and apricot jams made from the orchard’s own fruit. A Jesuit brother who still lives on the property showed me around the old dairy barn, explaining with obvious pride that the cheese recipe hadn’t changed since his predecessors wrote it down, and that the honey came from hives his community had kept going through the civil war years when almost everything else on the estate had to be rebuilt.
When to go: Spring and early summer bring the fullest lakes and greenest poplars, but the farm shop and walking paths are pleasant nearly year-round. Weekday afternoons are quietest; weekends bring picnicking families from Zahle and the surrounding towns.