Enfeh

Enfeh doesn’t advertise itself the way Byblos or Batroun do, which is precisely why I ended up loving it. The peninsula juts out from the coast north of Chekka, a low spread of white rock and scrub with almost none of the tourist infrastructure that’s crept into Lebanon’s more famous coastal towns, and the first thing I noticed driving in were the salt pans — a checkerboard of shallow rectangular pools cut into the rock, where seawater is trapped and left to evaporate under the sun until only crystallized salt remains, exactly the way Phoenician traders did it here three thousand years ago. A man raking a pan into low white pyramids waved me over and let me taste a pinch straight off his hand, coarser and more mineral than anything I’d get from a shaker.

The water around Enfeh is startlingly clear, and swimming just off the rocks near the old harbor I could see, several meters down, the outlines of submerged ruins — column drums and squared building stones from a settlement that predates most of what’s visible above water, slowly being reclaimed by the sea. Nobody had roped it off or built a viewing platform; a fisherman mending a net nearby told me it had “always been there,” with the shrug of someone who’d stopped finding it remarkable decades ago.

I ate lunch at a small family restaurant with plastic tables set right on the rocks, grilled sardines and a salad of purslane and tomato, watching fishing boats work the calm water between the peninsula and a scatter of small islets just offshore. There’s a scruffy, unfinished quality to Enfeh that I found more honest than picturesque — the ruins and the salt pans and the modern village exist alongside each other without any attempt to package them into a single narrative.

When to go: Summer for swimming over the ruins in warm, clear water. Late summer and early autumn also coincide with the most active salt harvest, when the pans are at their whitest.