BEIRUT

Lebanon and on and on

Downtown Beirut on a Havaianas-meltingly hot afternoon in June and a battle has broken out. Roxy Music’s Avalon, which had been wafting from the rooftop pool area of Le Gray, the city’s first boutique hotel, is suddenly drowned out by a percussion-heavy student band rehearsing for World Music Day on a raised stage in front of the nearby An-Nahar newspaper offices. A waiter turns up Bryan Ferry’s warble a couple of notches. Immediately the music several storeys below is jacked up further. Minutes later, the competing melodies are drowned out by the adhān reverberating from the Al Omari mosque. Soon a few dozen vehicles are honking their support for the Brazilian football team who, in three hours, will trounce the Ivory Coast in a World Cup match.

Twenty years since the end of a brutal 15-year civil war – Le Gray overlooks the bullet-pocked statue in Martyrs’ Square that is a symbol of that carnage – and just four years since a spat with Israel levelled more chunks of the city and left 1,200 Lebanese dead and thousands homeless, Beirut is booming.

During the day the famous downtown boulevards twinkle from a decade of sandblasting and at dusk they throng with proud families, strolling with ice creams. Although reconstruction of what is essentially the city’s heart began years ago, this elegant enclave is only now being fully absorbed into a wider nexus of commercial towers, tarmacked roads – most of which have utterly failed to tame Beirut’s drivers – an expanding port area and a hotel strip. Although Lebanon often appears to be a canvas for its many excitable political factions, religious sects and meddlesome neighbours to daub and scribble on, two places best express the aspirations of the New Beirut. One is Beirut Souks, a confident, modern take on the site’s 5,000-year-old architectural and commercial heritage, comprising 200, mainly upscale, shops, where the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, cut the opening ribbon at a Hermès store in July. The other is Gemmayzeh, where an energetic multinational crowd, many straying from the American University of Beirut campus, indulge in all-night drinking, karaoke – this city adores any excuse to shout – and dancing on the tables in every type of bar from smoky jazz dive to chic cocktail lounge. Think Berlin’s Kastanienallee meets anywhere in Ibiza Town.

Elsewhere, in choked Hamra – the once-grand shopping street that now resembles any Middle East crowd scene in a movie chase – dinky boutiques sell Japanese directional clothing, mid-20th-century French furniture and organic fig jam next to dusty emporia selling suits surely destined for a Super Fly convention. And in twee Saifi Village, with its rag-rolled cluster of galleries, antique stores and around 40 artisans’ shops, apartment prices have passed the $2m (€1.5m) mark. Some of the young or outpriced may bemoan the Disneyfication of an area nuzzling Martyrs’ Square but the twentysomethings consulting iPads over croque monsieurs and frozen lemonade at Balima Café in the quarter’s cobbled square, don’t seem to mind.

Neither do Nivine Maktabi, whose inviting Oumnia gallery does a brisk trade in extravagantly priced textile art, or Mroueh Fadi, a charming Parisian, whose upscale children’s boutique Les Petits Parisiens, has performed so well in its first year he has just opened a second store in Kuwait. “As all the shops become occupied they keep expanding the village. Whole blocks keep appearing on parking lots,” smiles Fadi.

Nowhere illustrates the frenzied investment climate in Beirut more than the new marina that will one day harbour 300 boats and be fringed with hotels and chichi retail developments. In June, a Four Seasons Hotel opened, owned by Saudi Prince AlWaleed Bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding Co.

Bin Talal alone has invested $500m (€390m) in Lebanon’s tourism sector and a further $1bn (€780bn) in the media and banking sectors. Th ere are 20 international hotels under construction in Beirut, and the Lebanese tourism minister, Fadi Abboud, says the number of visitors to the country will grow by 10%–20% in 2010. He has just doubled his marketing budget to $17m (€13m), in a bid to lasso as many of the 345 million tourists who will visit the Mediterranean region next year as possible.

With hotels currently jammed with business and leisure travellers, construction continuing apace and cash pouring in from the Gulf, Iran, the US and the Lebanese diaspora – emboldened by a well-run banking system and a property market in which some prices have tripled in four years – things look rosier than at any time since the country’s heyday in the 1960s. Indeed, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) recently raised its outlook on the Lebanese economy, predicting that GDP growth will reach 6.8% in 2010 – up 1% on its March forecast – and 5.8% in 2011. This would surpass growth in the whole Middle East region, which the EIU predicts will average 4.4%. The uptick in regional growth would further boost demand for Lebanese goods and services, particularly in the tourism sector.

In all, things should continue to blossom as long as the parliamentary majority dominated by Sunni Muslims, Druze and right-wing Christians (and backed by Saudi Arabia and the West) are not spooked by Hizbullah and other groups backed by Syria and Iran. And, of course, as long as Israel and Hizbullah refrain from trading rocket fire.

With the equilibrium so fragile there is still an edginess to the city, but this seems to feed as much energy as it saps. As hotelier Gordon Campbell Gray – whose first attempt to open Le Gray was thwarted in summer 2006 – puts it: “Everything feels more urgent when you’re aware that somewhere there are guns pointed at you.”

Nevertheless, smitten with Beirut, Gray is planning two new hotels, one in Damour, a beach resort 19km outside the city, the other a ski lodge in the mountains that flank it. And, just 12 months after opening, Le Gray is expanding, adding more guestrooms, a business centre and an international art gallery – a further ringing endorsement of the city’s new status. By Boyd Farrow