Kadisha Valley
Interesting facts
- The valley's natural mummies date from around 1283, the same year the Mamluk sultan Qalawun led a campaign into the area.
- An earlier Mamluk campaign under Sultan Baibars had already reached the region in 1268, fifteen years before Qalawun's.
- Tradition credits the founding of Qannoubin monastery to Emperor Theodosius the Great in 375, though it was more likely founded by Saint Theodosius the Cenobite.
- The Psalter printed at Qozhaya in 1610 ran to about 260 pages and set Arabic text in Syriac script, a form known as Garshuni.
- The Monastery of Our Lady of Hawqa, founded in the late thirteenth century, sits in a cliff cave about 1,150 metres above sea level.
- Excavations in the nearby cave of Aassi Hauqqa have yielded objects from the Palaeolithic, Roman and medieval periods.
- The church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus in the valley dates back to the mid-eighth century.
- By the time it reaches the sea at Tripoli, the Kadisha river is known by another name, the Nahr Abu Ali.
- Lebanon's cedar forests were already shrinking by the sixth century, in the time of the Byzantine emperor Justinian.
Why it is worth it
Below the bare summits of Mount Lebanon the ground falls away into a deep, green ravine whose cliffs are riddled with caves, chapels and monasteries tucked into the rock. The Kadisha Valley, from the Aramaic word for "holy", sheltered some of the earliest Christian monastic communities in the world, and together with the nearby Forest of the Cedars of God it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998.
The Kadisha river has carved the gorge over a distance of some 35 km through the North Governorate, between the districts of Bsharri and Zgharta. For centuries its inaccessible slopes drew hermits and monks who sought solitude, and above all it became a refuge for the Maronite Church. The monastery of Qannoubin, in the depths of the valley, served as the seat of the Maronite patriarch from the fifteenth century for several hundred years. The monastery of Saint Anthony of Qozhaya, at about 664 metres above sea level, is held to have begun as a hermitage in the fourth century; in the 1580s it received the first printing press in the Middle East, and in 1610 it produced a Psalter in Syriac and Arabic. It passed to the Lebanese Maronite Order in 1708 and in the nineteenth century housed more than three hundred monks. Its cave of Saint Anthony is still a place of pilgrimage. Between 1989 and 1991 eight naturally mummified bodies dating from around 1283 were discovered in a cave in the valley.
Higher up, on the slopes above the valley head, stands the Forest of the Cedars of God, a grove of some 375 trees, some of them claimed to be thousands of years old. The town of Bsharri, perched on the rim, was the birthplace of the writer and painter Kahlil Gibran, and the town looks straight down into the gorge.
Getting there
The valley lies below Bsharri, about 6.5 km away, in northern Lebanon. The nearest airport is Beirut–Rafic Hariri International (BEY), about 67 km away in a straight line; the route by road runs north along the coast and then climbs into the mountains.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Baatara Gorge Waterfall 14.3 km · waterfall
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Kadisha Valley, also romanized as the Qadisha Valley and also known as the Kadisha Gorge or Wadi Kadisha, is a gorge that lies within the Bsharri and Zgharta Districts of the North Governorate of Lebanon. The valley was carved by the Kadisha River, also known as the Nahr Abu Ali when it reaches Tripoli. Kadisha means "Holy" in Aramaic, and the valley is sometimes called the Holy Valley. It has sheltered Christian monastic communities for many centuries. The valley is located at the foot of Mount al-Makmal in northern Lebanon.
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