Litani River
— — the river that never leaves the country.
Not only on a wall.
“The longest river that runs only in Lebanon. It begins in the Beqaa, west of Baalbek, gathers itself in the long reservoir behind the Qaraoun Dam, then turns west through a deep limestone gorge and finds the sea above Tyre. Almost 170 kilometres without crossing a border. Farmers along the middle reach still call it the Leontes, the name the Greeks gave it. The water is overworked and the studio knows that, but the gorge in the early light is its own thing.
Litani River, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Litani is the longest river contained entirely within Lebanon, running roughly 170 kilometres from a source west of Baalbek in the Beqaa Valley to a mouth on the Mediterranean just north of Tyre. It is impounded behind the Qaraoun Dam, completed in 1959, which formed the artificial Lake Qaraoun and powers the Markabi and Awali hydroelectric stations. Below the dam the river drops through a deep gorge cut into the limestone of southern Lebanon before turning west to the coastal plain. Classical sources called it the Leontes.
Roughly 920 million cubic metres of water move through the Litani in an average year, draining a basin of about 2,170 square kilometres. The middle reach has been under heavy agricultural draw and pollution stress for decades, and the Litani River Authority has run remediation programmes since the early 2010s. The gorge below Qaraoun, by contrast, still runs clear in the wet months between January and April, and the canyon walls hold the light long after the valley floor is in shade. Beit ed-Dine sits above the western rim.
The Litani is a Mediterranean-rainfall river. Flow peaks between January and April, when the Mount Lebanon snowpack melts into the upper Beqaa, and falls sharply through the dry summer. By September the lower river can run thin under the bridges south of Nabatieh. The gorge below Qaraoun is most photographed in late February and March, when the water is high, the limestone is washed clean, and the almond trees on the western slope come into flower a few weeks before the rest of the valley.