A journey back to origins: the Chouf Mountains

What turns a story into experience and inspiration? Sometimes it is only a journey back to our origins, the crossroads between cultures, between East and West, to strengthen the profound emotional bond with our homeland. The past exalted by our memories thus leads back to landscapes that lend themselves to being chosen as places of the soul and our own imagination. Such as the Le Chouf Mountains region in Lebanon, a few dozen kilometres from Beirut. Thousands of years of history marked by lush nature, where the scent of the greatest cedar forest in Lebanon pervades the air, intermingling with the notes of the Mediterranean scrub. It is here that we find the village of Deir al-Qamar, the Monastery of the Moon. And it is also from here, from these magical places, that Lara Chamandi’s story began.