Baatara Gorge Waterfall

In spring, when snow melts on Mount Lebanon, a stream at Baatara pours over a ledge and plunges into an open shaft in the limestone, falling behind three natural rock bridges that arch one above the other across the abyss. The water disappears into the dark of the Balaa pothole, a sinkhole in Jurassic limestone that drops some 240 to 255 metres. The free fall of the cascade itself is about 90 to 100 metres. Seen from the rim, the stacked arches and the thread of white water vanishing into the earth make one of the strangest landscapes in the Levant.

The chasm, also called the Cave of the Three Bridges or the Gouffre des Trois Ponts, lies in the high country of the Batroun district, near the village of Chatine in the area of Tannourine. A path leads down from Balaa, a hamlet on the mountain road from Laqlouq to Tannourine, to the valley where the bridges stand. The site lies on the Lebanon Mountain Trail, the long-distance footpath that follows the range.

The pothole was described to European science in 1952 by the French biospeleologist Henri Coiffait, and cavers of the Spéléo Club du Liban surveyed it fully in the 1980s. Where the water goes was settled by a fluorescent dye test in 1988: the colour reappeared at the spring of Dalleh in the Mgharet al-Ghaouaghir cave, not far from Balaa.

Getting there

The gorge lies about 16 km from Bsharri, in the mountains of northern Lebanon, on the road between Laqlouq and Tannourine. Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport (BEY) is about 53 km away in a straight line.