This week's dream: Beirut, Lebanon

Beirut is back, says Carole Cadwalladr in The Observer - yes, the Lebanese capital is having a new dawn, and visitors are once again flocking to a city that, at its best, is nothing short of thrilling: "beautiful and ugly and pock-marked and damaged and unstable and exciting".

Are the bad times really over? No one can be sure, but the locals are seizing the moment, and the world is taking note: in January, the New York Times nominated Beirut its No.1 destination for 2009, while Lonely Planet named it as one of the world’s ten liveliest cities. The bars are buzzing and new hotels are springing up: Le Gray, a sister to London's fêted One Aldwych, has just opened, and a Four Seasons – "that seal of international luxury approval" – is on its way.

But these are just icing on an already "impossibly glamorous" cake: Beirut is the most cosmopolitan city in the Middle East, at once absurdly "flashy" and wonderfully "sophisticated", with a free press, sensational nightlife (including a thriving gay scene, although homosexuality is illegal), fabulous food and a “sublime” setting between mountains and sea.

The restored downtown area is "impressive", with "street after street of hand-carved stonework, beautifully restored mosques and churches, floodlit Roman ruins and designer boutiques bursting forth all over".

But to get a full sense of this country's beauty – and its astonishing diversity - it's worth driving out of the city to the spectacular Roman ruins at Baalbek (which are often almost deserted), through the "hot, dry" Bekaa valley, dotted with Hezbollah flags, across Mount Lebanon and down through the "lush, cloudy orchards" of the Christian heartlands to the tiny port of Batroûn, where women lounge in bikinis on the beach.
BMI (0844-848 4888; flybmi.com) flies direct to Beirut from £423 rtn. Cox & Kings (020-7873 5000;
coxandkings.co.uk) offers four-night breaks at Le Gray from £1,095pp, incl. flights.