Private Baalbek Temples & Ksara Wine Tour | From Beirut

9:00 AM — Departure from Beirut Your professional guide and driver collect you from your Beirut hotel and head east on the Damascus highway — climbing through the Lebanese mountains as the Bekaa Valley opens dramatically below, a vast fertile plain stretching between two mountain ranges that has been farmed, fought over, and celebrated for five thousand years.

Before the temples, stop at the ancient Roman quarry where the Stone of the Pregnant Woman still lies exactly where it was cut 2,000 years ago — a single limestone block 21 metres long and weighing an estimated 1,000 tonnes, never moved, never finished. Standing beside it before you enter the temple complex reframes everything you are about to see. If this is what the Romans left behind in the quarry — what did they actually use?

Enter the greatest temple of the Roman world — built on a platform of Trilithon stones each weighing over 800 tonnes, the largest dressed stones ever used in construction in human history. Six of the original 54 columns still stand at 22 metres tall — each one wider than a man can reach around. Your guide explains the extraordinary engineering mystery that still baffles archaeologists today: how the Romans moved and raised stones of this scale using ancient technology alone.

Walk to the Temple of Bacchus — larger than the Parthenon in Athens, almost entirely intact, and widely considered the best-preserved Roman temple in the world. Its towering carved doorway, ornate ceiling coffers, and 42 standing columns make it breathtaking by any measure. The circular Temple of Venus completes a complex that has outlasted every empire that built, conquered, and worshipped here over two thousand years.

From the colossal scale of Baalbek, arrive at something entirely different but equally ancient — Chateau Ksara, Lebanon's oldest winery, founded by Jesuit monks in 1857 and now the country's largest wine producer. The highlight is the extraordinary Roman cave cellar system stretching 2 kilometres beneath the winery — ancient tunnels discovered by the Jesuits in the late 19th century where wine ages at a naturally constant temperature year-round. After a morning walking through Roman ruins above ground, descending into Roman caves beneath a winery creates a remarkable symmetry — two worlds built by the same civilisation, one in monumental stone and one in underground silence. The tasting that follows showcases Ksara's iconic Cabernet-Syrah blends, crisp Blanc de Blancs, and beloved Sunset Rosé.

Lunch in Zahle — the Bride of the Bekaa End the Bekaa day in Zahle — Lebanon's most celebrated food and wine destination, known as the "Bride of the Bekaa." The famous restaurant strip along the Bardawni River is lined with terraces serving some of the finest Lebanese mezze in the country — generous spreads of cold and hot dishes, grilled meats, fresh bread, and local wine or arak, with the cool Bekaa mountain air and the sound of the river below. A long, unhurried lunch here feels like exactly the right way to end a day that began with the greatest temples on earth.

Return to Beirut — approx. 5:00–6:00 PM Scenic drive back over the Lebanese mountains via the Damascus highway with drop-off at your Beirut hotel — completing a day that moved from the world's greatest Roman temples to ancient wine cellars to the most celebrated lunch terraces in the Bekaa Valley.