A2 · Elementary
12 min
travelconflictculturehistoryeconomics
The City That Always Comes Back: Beirut and Tourism in Times of War
La Ciudad que Siempre Vuelve: Beirut y el Turismo en Tiempos de Guerra
Israel carries out a series of airstrikes across Lebanon, killing at least 32 people. Fletcher and Octavio dig into Beirut, a city that has been both a dream travel destination and a war zone, often at the same time.
Israel lanza una serie de ataques aéreos en el Líbano, matando a al menos 32 personas. Fletcher y Octavio hablan de Beirut, una ciudad que ha sido destino de viaje y zona de guerra al mismo tiempo.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| turista | tourist | Muchos turistas visitan Beirut en verano. |
| volver | to come back / to return | Quiero volver a Líbano un día. |
| seguridad | safety / security | Los turistas necesitan seguridad para viajar. |
| guerra | war | La guerra es muy mala para el turismo. |
| esperanza | hope | La gente de Líbano tiene mucha esperanza. |
| paz | peace | Sin paz, los turistas no pueden visitar el país. |
There's a city I've been thinking about for thirty years, and every time I think I'm done with it, something pulls me back.
Israel hit Lebanon again yesterday.
At least 32 people killed.
Multiple locations.
And my mind went immediately to a street in Beirut called Hamra, and a cafe that made the best coffee I'd had in my life.
Líbano es un país pequeño.
Lebanon is a small country.
Pero tiene una historia muy grande.
But it has a very big history.
Tiny.
About the size of Connecticut.
And Octavio, I covered that country twice for different outlets.
Once in the early nineties, once again around 2006 during the war with Hezbollah.
And both times, what struck me was this impossible coexistence of beauty and violence.
Beirut es una ciudad especial.
Beirut is a special city.
Muchos viajeros quieren visitar Beirut.
Many travelers want to visit Beirut.
They do.
Or they did.
Before all this.
And the reason I want to talk about Lebanon today, through the lens of travel, is that I genuinely think you cannot understand what these airstrikes cost unless you understand what Beirut has meant, historically, as a place people actually went to.
La gente llama a Beirut "el París del Medio Oriente."
People call Beirut "the Paris of the Middle East."
Right.
And that's not just a compliment.
That's a historical fact rooted in something real.
Beirut in the 1960s was genuinely one of the most glamorous cities on earth.
Banking capital of the Arab world.
Fashion, art, nightlife, the food, the Mediterranean coast.
Europeans went there for vacations the way they go to Barcelona now.
Sí.
Yes.
En los años 60, Líbano tenía muchos turistas.
In the 1960s, Lebanon had many tourists.
Era muy diferente.
It was very different.
And then the civil war started in 1975 and didn't end until 1990.
Fifteen years.
The whole city got carved up into sectarian zones.
The hotels that had hosted European jet-setters became sniper positions.
Green Line running straight through the middle.
The tourism industry essentially ceased to exist.
La guerra civil fue muy terrible.
The civil war was very terrible.
Muchas personas murieron.
Many people died.
Muchas familias salieron del país.
Many families left the country.
The Lebanese diaspora.
That's a whole other dimension.
There are more people of Lebanese descent living outside Lebanon than inside it.
Brazil alone has somewhere between seven and ten million people of Lebanese origin.
The diaspora sends enormous amounts of money home, and it's also part of what keeps the idea of Lebanon alive for travelers.
La familia es muy importante en la cultura libanesa.
Family is very important in Lebanese culture.
La diáspora quiere visitar su país.
The diaspora wants to visit their country.
Which is one of the tragedies of this ongoing conflict.
You have millions of people around the world with roots in Lebanon, whose whole identity is partly built around a place they can't safely go back to.
Or they go, and then this happens.
Muchos libaneses viven en Brasil, en Argentina, en Australia.
Many Lebanese people live in Brazil, in Argentina, in Australia.
Ellos quieren ir a Líbano.
They want to go to Lebanon.
Pero la guerra es un problema grande.
But the war is a big problem.
Now, after the civil war ended in 1990, Beirut did something that genuinely astonished the people who'd written it off.
It came back.
Slowly, then quickly.
The downtown district, Solidere, got rebuilt almost from nothing.
By the mid-2000s, travel writers were filing pieces about the best restaurants in Beirut.
I remember reading a piece in a glossy magazine about Beirut's nightlife as if the civil war had been a brief interruption.
Beirut tiene restaurantes muy buenos.
Beirut has very good restaurants.
La comida libanesa es famosa en el mundo.
Lebanese food is famous in the world.
The food is extraordinary.
Mezze, kibbeh, fattoush, the fresh seafood right on the Mediterranean.
And I say this as someone who ate there under, let's say, less than ideal circumstances.
There's something about Lebanese hospitality that survives everything.
I was there in 2006, in the middle of the war with Israel, and people were still offering you coffee.
En árabe, la hospitalidad es muy importante.
In Arabic, hospitality is very important.
Los libaneses dicen: "Mi casa es tu casa."
Lebanese people say: "My home is your home."
And then 2006 hits.
The war with Hezbollah.
Parts of the south destroyed.
The airport shut for weeks.
Tourism collapsed overnight.
Then came the long political stalemate, years of dysfunction, assassinations.
And just when it looked like things might stabilize, August 4th, 2020.
La explosión del puerto de Beirut.
The Beirut port explosion.
Eso fue horrible.
That was horrible.
Muchas personas murieron.
Many people died.
El puerto es muy importante para la economía.
The port is very important for the economy.
Two hundred and eighteen people killed.
Seven thousand injured.
Entire neighborhoods leveled.
The shockwave shattered windows across the whole city.
I watched the footage and I thought about every street I'd walked there, and it felt personal in a way that, I don't know, it's hard to explain if you haven't been somewhere.
El turismo necesita seguridad.
Tourism needs security.
Sin seguridad, los turistas no vienen.
Without security, tourists don't come.
Es muy simple.
It's very simple.
It is that simple.
And the economics are brutal.
Before 2019, tourism accounted for roughly a fifth of Lebanon's GDP.
A fifth.
And then you had the financial collapse in 2019, the port explosion in 2020, COVID, and now this ongoing conflict.
The Lebanese pound has lost something like ninety-eight percent of its value.
Ninety-eight percent.
El Líbano tiene muchos problemas económicos.
Lebanon has many economic problems.
Muchas personas no tienen dinero para comida.
Many people don't have money for food.
La situación es muy mala.
The situation is very bad.
And travel, tourism, was one of the few sectors that could genuinely help that.
You have the coastline, the cedars in the mountains, the ancient ruins at Baalbek, one of the most spectacular Roman sites anywhere in the world, the food culture, the music.
Lebanon had the raw material for a genuine tourism renaissance.
Repeatedly.
And repeatedly, the cycle restarts.
Baalbek es muy antiguo.
Baalbek is very ancient.
Los romanos vivían allí.
The Romans lived there.
Hoy, los turistas no pueden visitar fácilmente.
Today, tourists can't visit easily.
Baalbek is in the Bekaa Valley, which is also Hezbollah territory.
So even before this current round of airstrikes, getting there as a tourist was complicated.
There are entire sections of the country that travel advisories have had marked in red for years.
Which means the tourism that does happen gets concentrated into smaller and smaller corridors of relative safety.
Un turista necesita información.
A tourist needs information.
¿Es seguro este lugar?
Is this place safe?
¿Puedo ir aquí?
Can I go here?
Esas preguntas son muy importantes.
Those questions are very important.
And the terrible irony is that the parts of Lebanon that are most dangerous, the south near the Israeli border, the Bekaa Valley, are often where the most historically significant sites are.
So the conflict doesn't just kill people.
It literally walls off history from the people who want to witness it.
La historia y el turismo están juntos.
History and tourism are together.
Cuando hay guerra, los dos sufren.
When there is war, both suffer.
Let me ask you something, Octavio.
From a Spanish perspective, from the perspective of a country that rebuilt its tourism industry after its own devastating civil war, do you think there's a path back for Lebanon?
Is there a model there?
España tuvo una guerra civil también.
Spain had a civil war too.
Fue horrible.
It was horrible.
Pero España tiene paz ahora, y muchos turistas vienen.
But Spain has peace now, and many tourists come.
Thirty-two million visitors a year, last time I checked.
But Spain's recovery took decades, and it required political stability first.
That's the thing with Lebanon.
Every time it finds stability, external forces or internal ones, or both simultaneously, pull it back under.
It's not a failed state in the traditional sense.
It's a state that keeps getting prevented from succeeding.
Líbano necesita paz.
Lebanon needs peace.
Sin paz, no hay turismo.
Without peace, there is no tourism.
Sin turismo, no hay dinero.
Without tourism, there is no money.
Todo está conectado.
Everything is connected.
And Lebanon is caught between forces that are much bigger than itself.
Israel, Iran through Hezbollah, Syria, the Gulf states, the United States.
Every major regional player has a stake in what Lebanon is and what it becomes.
The Lebanese people are, in a real sense, living inside other people's geopolitical arguments.
Líbano es pequeño.
Lebanon is small.
Los países grandes tienen mucho poder allí.
The big countries have a lot of power there.
Es una situación difícil para la gente normal.
It is a difficult situation for normal people.
The regular people.
The woman who runs the bakery on the corner.
The guy who owns a guest house in the mountains and spent five years saving up to renovate it.
Those are the people who lose every single time this cycle repeats.
And I think that's what I want listeners to hold onto from today's conversation: these airstrikes aren't just a number.
Thirty-two deaths is thirty-two people.
And behind them is an entire country's worth of deferred hope.
La esperanza es importante.
Hope is important.
Los libaneses tienen mucha esperanza.
Lebanese people have a lot of hope.
Pero también tienen mucho dolor.
But they also have a lot of pain.
Both at the same time.
That's the thing that's always defined Beirut for me.
The ability to hold both things at once.
Beauty and catastrophe, hospitality and fear.
I've never encountered anything quite like it anywhere else I've reported from.
And I reported from a lot of places.
Octavio: Creo que Beirut va a volver.
I believe Beirut will come back.
La ciudad siempre vuelve.
The city always comes back.
Siempre.
Always.
I want to believe that.
I really do.
And I think history supports you, up to a point.
But every time it comes back, it comes back to something slightly smaller than what it was.
And at some point you have to ask: how many cycles can any place absorb before the thing that made it special doesn't survive the reconstruction?
Eso es una pregunta muy seria, Fletcher.
That is a very serious question, Fletcher.
No tengo una respuesta fácil.
I don't have an easy answer.
Neither do I.
And honestly, I think that's the honest place to end.
Not with a neat conclusion, but with the question itself.
Because the people of Lebanon deserve to have the question taken seriously, not just the tragedy reported and forgotten.
Sí.
Yes.
Y los viajeros pueden aprender sobre Líbano.
And travelers can learn about Lebanon.
Es importante conocer este país.
It is important to know this country.
Actually, wait.
You just used a construction a moment ago that I want to ask you about, because it surprised me.
You said "Beirut va a volver." Not "Beirut vuelve." Both mean Beirut comes back, right?
But they feel different.
Sí, son diferentes.
Yes, they are different.
"Vuelve" es el presente.
'Vuelve' is the present.
"Va a volver" habla del futuro.
'Va a volver' talks about the future.
Es una cosa que va a pasar.
It's something that is going to happen.
So "va a" plus an infinitive is like "going to" in English.
"Va a volver" is "it's going to come back." Which is actually a more hopeful statement than just the plain present tense, isn't it.
You were making a deliberate choice.
Sí.
Yes.
"Va a volver" tiene esperanza.
'Va a volver' has hope.
"Vuelve" es un hecho.
'Vuelve' is a fact.
Son dos ideas distintas.
They are two different ideas.
That's a genuinely useful distinction.
In English we'd say "Beirut comes back" for habitual fact and "Beirut is going to come back" for a prediction, a statement of belief.
Spanish does the same thing with "ir a" plus infinitive.
So "voy a comer" is "I'm going to eat." "Vamos a volver" is "we're going to return."
Exacto.
Exactly.
"Ir a" más infinitivo es fácil y muy útil.
'Ir a' plus infinitive is easy and very useful.
Los estudiantes pueden usar esto cada día.
Students can use this every day.
And it means I can say "voy a aprender español" and sound like I have a plan, rather than just a vague intention.
Which is progress.
Though knowing my track record with confident Spanish statements, I'll probably end up telling someone I'm going to give birth to a language lesson.
Fletcher, tú eres muy especial.
Fletcher, you are very special.
"Voy a estar embarazado" no es una frase correcta.
'I am going to be pregnant' is not a correct phrase.