This week’s travel dream: Living for the moment in a resurgent Beirut

Years of turmoil have “supercharged” Beirut with a singular spirit, said Anthony Sattin in the British Condé Nast Traveller. Living through a two-decade civil war that lasted into the 1990s, the city’s citizens somehow concluded that it was “worth dodging bullets and ducking shells” just to attend a horse race or watch models strut down a catwalk. And that attitude has not only endured—it’s catching. When I visit Beirut, I find myself “wanting to make the most of today, every day.”

Money has recently poured back into this city on the Mediterranean. Lebanon is, after all, “one of the quieter places” in a region undergoing revolution, and when Western banks crashed, the nation’s capital started taking on “a sparkle and a shine that haven’t been seen here since the glamorous 1960s.” Newly fashionable areas, full of designer stores, are popping up everywhere. At the trendy restaurant Tawlet, in the Mar Mikhael district, I eat at a large communal table where I’m soon immersed in “a mix of local gossip and political judgment, a few lines of poetry leavened by a touch of philosophy”—all “whisked together with much laughter.” This seems the very mix that “spices the Lebanese lust for life.”

Beirut routinely empties on Sundays, when many people head to the beaches. But after a late night at a rooftop restaurant where the dancing only got started at 1:30, I opt for an in-town swim. The Sporting Club is a city institution where, for $20, “you get a lounger, a salt-water pool, an overworked waiter bringing beers,” and a crowd that feels like Beirut in microcosm. Afterward, I walk around the neighborhood and stop at Martyrs’ Square, “one of the city’s focal points” and a site where Lebanese nationalists were hanged in 1916 after rebelling against Turkish rule. The statue commemorating those events includes a figure that lost one of its arms during the civil war, reminding me of the Lebanese saying “One hand alone cannot clap.” As I cross the square, I hear joyful clapping—“not just two hands, but dozens, and with it some cheering.” Always, Beirut is celebrating.

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At the Hotel Albergo (albergobeirut.com), suites start at $350