BEIRUT - More than one million tourists visited Lebanon in the month of July, a record number for the tiny Mediterranean country, the tourism ministry said on Tuesday.
"It's enormous -- we have never seen this before," said ministry director Nada Sardouk.
By the end of the month 1,007,352 tourist arrivals had been recorded, she said, including more than 325,000 Lebanese expatriates and just as many Syrians.
Saudi Arabians and tourists from other Arab states have also visited in droves, and reservations for the holy month of Ramadan, which starts around August 22, are "very strong," Sardouk added.
Many Europeans are also visiting this summer, with close to 79,000 arrivals in July from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, she said.
The ministry has said Lebanon hopes to have hosted two million tourists by the end of 2009, a figure roughly equivalent to half the country's population.
Tourism made a dramatic recovery in 2008 with the arrival of 1.3 million visitors in the country once dubbed the "Switzerland of the Middle East."
Tourism in Lebanon had taken a beating in recent years after the Israeli war on Lebanon.
Israel waged a bloody 34-day war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 after Hezbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid that aimed to free Lebanese soldiers from Israeli prisons. The bodies of the soldiers were returned in a prisoner swap.
The war claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Hezbollah, originally a resistance group formed to counter an Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, had forced the Israeli military out of Lebanon in 2000. Israel, however, continues to occupy the Lebanese Shabaa Farms.
Israeli flights over Lebanon occur on an almost daily basis and are in breach of UN Security Council resolution 1710, which in August 2006 ended the war.
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