Jeita Grotto
Interesting facts
- The upper galleries stretch for about 2.1 km, while the lower river cave has been explored for about 6.2 km.
- The spring flowing out of the lower cave supplies drinking water to roughly one and a half million people in and around Beirut.
- The Red Chamber in the upper cave is about 106 metres high and between 30 and 50 metres wide.
- The underground river discharges about one to two cubic metres of water every second, depending on the season.
- Jeita Grotto reached the final shortlist of the New7Wonders of Nature campaign, though it was not among the seven chosen in 2011.
- The grotto has appeared on a Lebanese postage stamp of 1961 and on the country's one-pound banknote of 1964.
- The upper galleries were discovered in 1958 by cavers of the Lebanese Caving Club, which had been founded only seven years earlier.
- A sculpture by Tony Farah called The Guardian of Time stands outside the entrance to the lower cave.
Why it is worth it
In the valley of the Nahr al-Kalb, the Dog River, about 18 km north of Beirut, the limestone of Mount Lebanon hides one of the most spectacular cave systems of the Middle East. Jeita Grotto is really two caves, one above the other, explored over a combined length of nearly nine kilometres. The lower one is the channel of an underground river – the main source of the Nahr al-Kalb and of drinking water for much of Beirut. The upper one, sixty metres higher, is dry and crowded with stone.
The lower cave entered modern history in 1836, when the American missionary William Thomson walked some fifty metres in, fired his gun and heard from the echoes that the cavern ran far into the mountain. In 1873–1874 engineers of the Beirut Water Company pushed more than a kilometre upstream and left their names on a pillar, and a bottle with their record sealed by lime on top of a stalagmite. Lebanese cavers of the Spéléo Club du Liban carried the exploration further from the 1950s, and in 1958 they found the upper galleries. An access tunnel was cut in the late 1960s, and the upper cave opened with a concert of electronic music by François Bayle; Karlheinz Stockhausen performed there the same year.
A visit follows both levels. In the upper gallery a walkway leads for about 750 metres through chambers of white, pure calcite and others tinted red by iron oxide, past curtains, columns and draperies of dripstone, and beneath what is described as the longest known stalactite in the world, over eight metres long. The largest chamber rises more than 120 metres. Below, electric boats glide across the still, green water of the river for about 500 metres between stalagmites reflected in the dark. The lower cave cannot be visited in winter when the water is high. After closing during the civil war in 1978, the caves welcomed visitors again from 1995 and became once more the country's best-loved natural sight.
Getting there
The grotto is in the municipality of Jeita in the Keserwan district, about 4.6 km from Jounieh and 18 km north of Beirut. Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport (BEY) is 19.8 km away by straight line. A cable car and a small road train link the parts of the site; photography inside the caves is not allowed.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Raouché Rocks, Beirut 16.8 km · rock-formation
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Jeita Grotto is a system of two separate, but interconnected, karstic limestone caves spanning an overall length of nearly 9 kilometres (5.6 mi). The caves are situated in the Nahr al-Kalb river valley within the locality of Jeita, 18 kilometres (11 mi) north of the Lebanese capital Beirut. Though inhabited in prehistoric times, the lower cave was not rediscovered until 1836 by Reverend William Thomson; it can only be visited by boat since it channels an underground river that provides fresh drinking water to more than a million Lebanese.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
33.94392, 35.64061per Wikidata