Jounieh Cable Car

When the Jounieh Cable Car (Téléférique de Jounieh) was constructed in 1965, Jounieh was a sleepy fishing village with just a couple of small houses. It remained so until the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, a decade later, when the population of the city skyrocketed, as a huge number of mostly Christian Lebanese moved here to escape the horrors of the battlefields of Beirut. This large influx of people changed the fishing village into a large city with a population of more than 100,000, and changed the nature of the cable car completely.

It wasn’t long until the green hills of Jounieh, on which the cable car was built, were covered in large apartment blocks to accomodate the huge waves of migrating people. The fighting stopped in 1990, but the city continues to thrive and is still one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. Today, the cable car ascends between these apartment blocks – in parts just a couple of meters away from the buildings – which offers rather bizarre views into the apartments and onto the balconies of its inhabitants. The ride takes about nine minutes and leads to the Christian statue of Our Lady of Lebanon at Harissa.