Faraya

Every Lebanese person had told me the same thing before I made the drive up to Faraya: you can ski in the morning and swim in the afternoon. I’d assumed this was the kind of exaggeration that tourism boards specialize in, so I decided to actually test it, and it turned out to be true almost to the point of being absurd — I left a beach near Jbeil around ten in the morning, salt still drying on my skin, and by half past eleven I was renting boots at the base of Mzaar Kfardebian, Lebanon’s largest ski area, watching my breath fog in air that had dropped by twenty degrees over the course of a single mountain road.

The resort itself is unpretentious by European standards — a scattering of chalets and a handful of chairlifts strung across bowls of decent, occasionally excellent snow — but what it lacks in glamour it makes up for with a genuinely surreal sense of place. Standing at the top of one of the lifts on a clear day, I could see, in a single sweep, snow-capped peaks in one direction and, on the haziest of days, a suggestion of the blue Mediterranean in the other, the whole width of the country compressed into one field of view.

The apres-ski culture surprised me too — chalets serving mulled wine and manakish fresh off a saj griddle, a crowd that skews young, well-off, and thoroughly bilingual, switching between Arabic, French, and English mid-sentence without apparently noticing. I ended the day at a wooden lodge with a fireplace, eating knefeh with a group of Beirutis who’d made the same morning-beach, afternoon-slopes trip so many times it had stopped registering as remarkable to them at all.

When to go: December through March for reliable snow, with January and February offering the most consistent conditions. Come on a weekday if you can — weekends draw heavy crowds from Beirut, just over an hour away.