Phoenicia's queen city — Alexander's causeway, Roman hippodrome, and a beach the ancients knew
Tyre (Sur) was the greatest Phoenician city, the birthplace of Dido of Carthage and the inventor of the purple dye that coloured Roman emperors. Alexander the Great spent seven months building a kilometre-long causeway into the sea to capture it in 332 BCE — that causeway became permanent, making what was an island city into a peninsula. Its Roman ruins include one of the finest hippodromos in existence and a well-preserved necropolis; the beach beside the archaeological site is one of Lebanon's best.
Tyre dominated Mediterranean trade for nearly a millennium — Phoenician merchant ships from Tyre established colonies from Cadiz to Carthage. The city's wealth came from its monopoly on Murex snail-derived purple dye (Tyrian purple), which was literally worth its weight in silver. Alexander the Great's siege in 332 BCE was one of antiquity's greatest military engineering feats and effectively ended Tyre's independence. UNESCO inscribed the archaeological site in 1984; it remains one of the most archaeologically significant cities in the Levant.