A Grower’s Map of Lebanon

Lebanon presses oil from groves that are among the oldest continuously worked in the world. From the coastal hills to the high terraces, olive growing here is woven into village life and survived through decades of upheaval. This is a working map of the country, grove by grove.

From coast to mountain

Lebanon’s olives climb. The groves start on the coastal plains and rise up the terraced mountainsides, some at altitudes that would surprise a Mediterranean grower used to flatter country. The north, around Koura and the hills behind Tripoli, is classic olive country — dense, old groves feeding village mills. The south has its own long tradition, and trees of genuinely ancient age dot the landscape, a few claimed to be millennia old. Most holdings are small and family-run, rain-fed, and worked much as they were generations ago. It is an old-world picture, and a reminder of just how deep the olive’s roots run in this part of the eastern Mediterranean.

The local varieties

The workhorse variety is Souri (also written Soury), named for the southern city of Tyre, prized for a robust, high-quality oil and grown widely across the country and the wider Levant. Other local types — Baladi among them, the name simply meaning “local” — fill out the picture, suited to particular hills and uses. The result is oils with character: often green, peppery and assertive when fresh, reflecting both the varieties and the mountain growing conditions. For curing, Lebanese households put up their own table olives every autumn, a domestic tradition as alive here as anywhere on the sea.

Based on general knowledge of Lebanese olive growing and Levantine varieties.