The Med from the Mountains

From 2,000 metres up in the Lebanese mountains, you can see the Mediterranean Sea – the Med.

A friend of mine has recently bought a chalet up there. It’s intended as the summer retreat away from the heat, humidity and pollution of Beirut. There’s also easy access onto the pistes of the biggest ski domain in the country, Faraya, so it’ll get great winter use too. Something of a perfectionist, he is putting the final touches to the recently created garden, with sun-deck, barbecue area, hammock and ready planted already half-grown trees, floodlit at night. The view is simply, sorry but no other word for it, fantastic.

Quite a place, yet the demand for such retreats is running strongly, with land prices jumping by a factor of about hundred in the last ten years. Concrete, stone, marble, tower cranes and all the paraphernalia of construction are discretely hidden from view but are all there if you care to look.

After banking and finance, Lebanon’s biggest business sector is construction. And that is putting demands on water (twenty-odd dams are proposed to be built), transport (improvements to the coastal, North-South motorway have been followed by extra, modern roads being laid to get up the mountains), electricity (there’s a five year plan to build more power stations and upgrade the distribution system) and the other utilities like telecommunications. Let’s hope all those plans come to fruition.

But perhaps the biggest demand is on the air. Looking down from the mountain, Beirut is often covered with what looks like a cloud of pollution and the biggest contributors are the rush hour traffic jams. Pictures of old Beirut show trams and buses which look well-appointed. The defunct railway station is still a land-mark, at least by name. The long term solution has to be to recreate that first class public transportation system and then market it strongly to wean the Lebanese off their cars.

That is going to take half a generation at least, but is essential to grasp and start work on now, otherwise our children and grand-children may well not be able to see the Med when they take the trip 2,000 metres up in the mountains.