One recent summer day, when the heat was unbearable, I made my way to the Jeita Grotto, a cave system formed over millions of years and hidden under a mountain that looks out on the Mediterranean, only 30 minutes from Beirut. At the entrance, we were asked to lock our phones and speak softly. Life jackets were mandatory, and we donned them before boarding the small boat waiting to take us inside.
As soon as the boat slipped further inside, the air changed. It was cooler, quieter, as if I’d crossed into another world: no photos, no echoes, no noise. The grotto itself imposes reverence; you feel you are in the presence of something ancient, something far larger than you can ever imagine. Respect becomes instinctive. The rules were meant to protect what is perhaps the country’s most breathtaking natural wonder. And for once, it felt good to obey them.
The dark water shimmered under the faint light. My hands itched to dip into it, but restraint felt like the greater choice. The rock formations looked alive, sculpted not by hands, but by water and patience. Gazing at the abstract shapes, it was hard to believe that this place — ancient, untouched, delicate — still existed in a country that has lost so much of what once made it whole. For a moment, I felt proud, even relieved, that we were capable of protecting something sacred. That after decades of war and corruption, we had learned restraint.
Or had we?
Then, weeks later, came the videos. On social media, the grotto appeared, but this time the silence had been replaced by music. The dim, reverent light had turned into strobes and spotlights. A wedding — or something like one — was unfolding beneath the stalactites and stalagmites. The caves had become a party venue.
The grotto is one of Lebanon’s most treasured sites, a vast system of limestone caves discovered in the 1830s by the Rev. William Thomson, an American missionary, and opened to the public in the 1950s. A finalist in an initiative to find the world’s “New Seven Wonders of Nature,” it has long been considered a true success story in Lebanon’s faltering tourism industry.
The site is managed by the local municipality and is under the supervision of the Ministry of Tourism. When the videos surfaced (along with reports of a candlelit yoga class held in the grotto earlier that summer), outrage followed, swiftly prompting Prime Minister Nawaf Salam to call for an investigation.
My first reaction was to curse artificial intelligence; I was sure it was some silly fabricated clip. It looked unreal, as though someone had taken a sacred place and placed it into a commercial. Until I read the caption. Bodies swayed to the beat, laughter echoed off the stone and a musician hyped up his crowd. It was to the tunes of Fairuz that they were seen celebrating, and for a moment I almost wanted to forgive them, if only because their taste in music was good.
I wasn’t surprised. In Lebanon, those with money can own almost anything — mountainsides, beaches, forests and even the horizon. Our coastline, technically public land, has long been parceled out to private investors who build fenced resorts that keep ordinary people away from the sea. Why should a cave be any different?
That’s the logic of privilege here: that beauty belongs to those who can pay for it, and reverence is a rule for everyone else.
What happened in Jeita isn’t new, and it isn’t only Lebanese. Across the Arab world, the past is something to be displayed, rented or sold. Wealth has become a kind of passport, one that grants access to everything.
A few years ago in Cairo, at the foot of the pyramids that once guarded the desert in silence, a lavish wedding provoked similar outrage. In Jordan, film crews light up Wadi Rum for scenes meant to evoke other planets. In Morocco, palaces once belonging to dynasties are now boutique hotels, their courtyards filled with influencers performing nostalgia, or something like it. In the Gulf, islands and coastlines reclaimed from the sea are marketed as private paradises.
We are a region obsessed with our history, yet somehow also careless with it. We polish our ruins for visitors and for the wealthy among us, but we rarely ask what they mean or what they need. Perhaps it is the exhaustion of nations that have seen too much — war, corruption and loss — that makes us cling to the visible symbols of pride while neglecting their substance.
Everywhere, the same story repeats: Heritage becomes commodity, reverence turns into spectacle. The line between celebration and desecration grows thin, blurred by profit and prestige.
The message is clear: In our part of the world, money doesn’t just buy comfort or influence, it buys history.
And yet, not all use is misuse.
Every summer, Lebanon’s ancient sites — Baalbek, Byblos and Beiteddine, among others — come alive with music. The festivals that bear their names are open to everyone: students, families, tourists, the curious and the cultured. The ticket prices range from modest to extravagant, but the idea remains democratic: that heritage can be shared, that the beauty of these things is multiplied when they are brought together.
They are examples of what respect can look like. In Baalbek, the stage rises between Roman columns that have witnessed empires fall. When Umm Kulthum, the late Egyptian diva, sang in the temple of Bacchus, it wasn’t a party; it was a benediction. Her voice honored not only the greatness of Roman architecture but the holiness that time itself bestows.
In Byblos, the sound of a guitar carries over the sea. The light touches the stone gently, never trying to outshine it. These are performances of care and pride made public. They elevate rather than desecrate.
Such festivals remind us that our monuments can live again, that preservation need not mean silence. They make Lebanon visible once more on the map of arts and culture, newsworthy for something other than death and despair. They turn it from a relic into a living place, capable of beauty and of gathering its people around something larger than themselves.
There is a difference between using our heritage and owning it, between celebrating history and turning it into decor. The former asks us to participate; the latter demands that we look away.
The question lingers: What does it say about us, as Lebanese, as Arabs, that we rent out our heritage? That the places meant to anchor us have become props for vanity? Perhaps it is not greed alone, but a deeper forgetting, a loss of measure. We have lived through wars, occupations, collapses, the erosion of meaning itself, yet somehow the slow erosion of our values feels more devastating.
We have learned to protect ourselves from hunger and loss, but not from the allure of privilege. The same instincts that hollowed out our politics now corrode our sense of belonging. When the wealthy can rent the grotto and the poor can no longer reach the sea, what kind of nation remains?
Maybe we no longer know how to protect what we love unless it turns a profit.
Heritage is supposed to humble us, to remind us that time is greater than wealth. But in much of the Arab world, money has become the only continuity we trust. The rich move between cities and countries, buying views and histories, while the rest of us stand outside the gates, proud, nostalgic, powerless.
The Jeita Grotto took millions of years to form, a slow creation of drips and silence. When I think of it now, I no longer see the caves as I did that summer afternoon, quiet and cool and reverent. I imagine the echoes of that music fading, swallowed by the stone. The grotto has endured far worse than us. It will survive, of course. But what about the idea of a nation that once believed some things were too sacred to own?
We speak of heritage as though it were a thing we inherit, not a duty we owe. Each time we turn a monument into a private stage, we chip away at something older than our country and more fragile than our pride.
Lebanon has long been called a failed state. But failure is not only the absence of institutions, it is also the loss of conscience.
“Spotlight” is a newsletter about underreported cultural trends and news from around the world, emailed to subscribers twice a week. Sign up here.