Advisory - travel not recommended · checked 5 Aug 2026
Syria
Foreign ministries advise against all travel to Syria. Fourteen years of war have left unexploded ordnance and mine contamination across much of the country, the security situation after the 2024 change of government remains unsettled, and consular assistance is minimal to nonexistent. Standard scores are suspended while this alert is active.
Official advisory →Read the advisory first: foreign ministries advise against all travel to Syria, there is no part of the country that an honest reading calls visitable today, and this route is published for the day that changes rather than as an invitation for now. It is built entirely on the corridor that was genuinely travelled before March 2011 — Damascus, Maaloula, Homs, Krak des Chevaliers, Hama, Apamea, Aleppo and the limestone villages of the Idlib massif — and it stays west of the Euphrates, out of the north-east, the Deir ez-Zor corridor, the Palmyra desert and the southern border strip, where mine and ordnance contamination is heaviest and where the fighting ran longest.
Into Damascus
Almost everyone still arrives by road. Come in over the Anti-Lebanon from Beirut and the city appears all at once on the plain of the Ghouta, which is the approach every traveller for two thousand years has described. Do nothing on the first afternoon except walk the Old City, listed by UNESCO in 1979: the Umayyad Mosque, finished under al-Walid I in 715 on ground that held a temple of Jupiter and then the basilica of St John the Baptist, and Saladin's tomb in the garden beside it, where the marble sarcophagus was a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1898 and the wooden one next to it is the original.
The museum, and the rest of the walls
The National Museum closed in 2012, moved what it could into storage, and reopened in October 2018 with a fraction of the galleries. What is out is still extraordinary: the Ugarit alphabet tablets, the reconstructed Dura-Europos synagogue, the Palmyrene funerary busts. Then back into the Old City on foot — Straight Street, which Roman surveyors laid out and which is still the axis of everything, the Azm Palace of 1749, and Souq al-Hamidiyya under its bullet-pocked iron roof, where the holes are from a French bombardment in 1925.
Maaloula and Saidnaya
North-east into the Qalamoun hills, where Maaloula is one of three villages — with Jubb'adin and Bakh'a — that still speak Western Neo-Aramaic. The monastery of Mar Sarkis sits above the gorge and the convent of Mar Taqla below it. The village was fought over from September 2013, twelve nuns were taken from Mar Taqla that December and released the following March, and the icons that were stolen have only partly come back. Saidnaya, on the way, has a convent traditionally founded in 547 and, a few kilometres off, the prison the Assad government ran as the end of the line for its own detainees — Amnesty International documented mass hangings there, and when the gates were opened in December 2024 the families who came looking found far fewer people alive than they had names on their lists. How many died in it is not known and the published estimates are not close to each other. The convent and the prison share a name and nothing else.
North to Homs
Two hours up the M5 through the gap between the Anti-Lebanon and the Jabal an-Nusayriyah, the corridor that has carried every army and every caravan between Damascus and the north. Homs is the hardest stop on this route and the necessary one. The old city was besieged from 2012 and the last fighters left under a UN-brokered deal in May 2014; whole quarters are still rubble stacked into lots. The Khalid ibn al-Walid mosque, rebuilt in its present form in 1908 over the tomb of the general who took the city in 636, lost its dome and a minaret to shelling in 2013 and has been repaired. Walk it with someone local or not at all.
Krak des Chevaliers
West through the Homs gap to the castle the Knights Hospitaller held from 1142 and rebuilt after the earthquakes of 1170 and 1202, until Baybars took it in 1271 after a siege of about a month. T. E. Lawrence, writing his undergraduate thesis in 1909, called it the most wholly admirable castle in the world, and the inner ward is why: a glacis, a berm, a talus and a gallery, all of it still legible. UNESCO listed it in 2006 with Qal'at Salah El-Din and moved it to the danger list in June 2013, after a year of shelling; the heaviest damage came the following March, when the castle was retaken under airstrikes. Restoration has been running since; the damage to the chapel and the south tower is not hidden.
Hama and the wheels
An hour north to a town on the Orontes that lives with two facts at once. Seventeen norias survive on the river — wooden wheels, the largest around 20 m (66 ft) across, that do not pump for a pump's sake but lift water into stone aqueducts to feed the gardens and the mosques, and they groan continuously when the river is high enough to turn them. Four were burned in 2014. The other fact is February 1982, when the army put down a rising here and levelled a large part of the old city; the death toll has never been established and the published estimates range from several thousand to tens of thousands, which is itself the point.
Apamea
North-west onto the plateau above the Ghab, where Seleucus I laid out a city around 300 BC and named it for his wife Apama. The Great Colonnade runs for something close to 2 km (1.2 mi), and the spiral-fluted columns along it are unlike anything else in the Roman east. It is also the clearest lesson in what the war did to sites nobody was shelling: from 2011 the plain was worked over with metal detectors and, in places, mechanical diggers, and satellite imagery published through the 2010s showed the ground pitted with thousands of illegal excavation holes. The mosaics went to the market. Very little of it has come back.
Aleppo, the citadel and the souq
Two and a half hours north to a city that has been continuously occupied for something in the region of five thousand years and looks, in parts, about four years old. The citadel mound holds work from the third millennium BC downwards, though what you climb is largely Ayyubid, built under az-Zahir Ghazi around 1200; the 6 February 2023 earthquake cracked the eastern wall and brought down part of the Ottoman mill inside it. Below, the covered souq of al-Madina — around 13 km (8 mi) of lanes, the largest such market anywhere — burned in the fighting of autumn 2012 and has been rebuilt in sections since 2017, with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and Aleppo's own trades. Some lanes trade. Some are still roof beams.
Jdeideh and the Great Mosque
A walking day in the old city. Al-Jdeideh is the merchants' quarter of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — courtyard houses in banded stone, Beit Ghazaleh and Beit Achiqbash among them, several of them shells and several of them working again. The Great Mosque took the worst of it: the minaret dated 1090 came down in April 2013, and its stones were numbered and stacked. Whether to raise it again out of them, or leave it down as the record of what happened, is precisely the argument this route keeps walking into. The Baron Hotel of 1911, further out, is closed and still standing, which is more than most of its guest list managed.
Saint Simeon and Qalb Lozeh
North-west into the limestone hills. Qal'at Sim'an was raised around 476 to 491 over the pillar Simeon spent decades on top of — four basilicas arranged in a cross around an octagonal court, among the largest churches in the world when it was built, and the pillar itself worn to a stump by pilgrims taking pieces of it. It was hit from the air in May 2016 and lost part of its fabric. Qalb Lozeh, on the ridge beyond, is a village church of about 460 whose twin-towered front is routinely cited as an ancestor of the Romanesque façade, six hundred years early.
Serjilla, al-Bara and out
South-west into the Jabal Riha, the southern half of the massif, for the two villages that explain the whole landscape. Serjilla has a bath house dated by its mosaic inscription to 473 and a men's meeting hall beside it, both standing to eaves height. Al-Bara is the largest of the settlements, with pyramid-roofed tombs and olive presses in the fields between the houses. Nothing here has a defensive wall, because for four or five centuries nothing here needed one. Read the ground before you walk on it, keep to what is obviously a path, and end the day either back in Aleppo or on the long run down the M5 to Damascus.
Good to know
Start with the advisory, because it is not a formality here. Foreign ministries advise against all travel to Syria. Fourteen years of war left mine and unexploded ordnance contamination across a large part of the country, and clearance organisations recorded more than a thousand civilian dead and injured in the first year after the change of government in December 2024, as displaced families moved back onto ground nobody had cleared — the published totals differ between organisations and none of them claims to be complete. The security picture after that change is unsettled and has moved sharply and locally more than once. Following this route today means travelling against that advice. We publish it because a country we cover should not silently lack a route, and because advisories change.
Insurance is the line most people get wrong. An ordinary travel policy excludes a country under an against-all-travel advisory outright: it does not pay less, it does not pay at all. A small number of specialist underwriters write high-risk cover that does respond, and for eleven days it runs to several hundred euros for one person. Read what it actually buys — the clause that matters is medical evacuation, because the Syrian health system is a large part of what you are insuring against needing.
Entry has been a moving target since December 2024. Through 2025 the workable pattern was to have a Syrian agency arrange approval in advance and collect the visa at the border or the airport, rather than at an embassy. That has changed more than once and will change again, so confirm the mechanics the week you travel and not the month you book. Evidence of a visit to Israel — a stamp, a crossing record, an airline itinerary — has meant refusal at the Syrian border for decades, and nothing since December 2024 has clearly reversed it. Assume it still holds and ask your agency rather than testing it at the crossing.
Money is cash and only cash. The Syrian pound has been through repeated devaluation and redenomination; foreign cards do not work, ATMs will not serve them, and no bank on this route will help you. Bring clean, unmarked, small-denomination US dollars, more than you think, split across more than one place. Washington eased much of its Syria sanctions programme during 2025 and the banking channels are slowly reconnecting, but European and American banks still de-risk anything touching the country, so do not assume a transfer will arrive or a card will be honoured. Sanctions compliance is your responsibility and not your agency's — check your own government's current rules before you pay anyone.
On the ground, do not improvise. Go with a local operator who has a driver, a fixer and current knowledge of which roads are open this week; checkpoints are frequent and the answer to all of them is a passport and no camera. Do not photograph checkpoints, soldiers, damaged government buildings or anything you have to explain. Local curfews are imposed at short notice. At every ruin and in every damaged quarter, stay on hard surfaces and on obvious paths: a piece of ordnance under rubble and a wall that has been standing on nothing since 2016 will both kill you, and neither is signposted. That danger is on top of the political one, not instead of it. 2025 brought mass killings on the coast in March and in the south around Suwayda in July, and both spread within days of starting — which is the speed this route has to be planned around, and the reason it excludes both areas.
This route deliberately excludes several things. It does not cross the Euphrates and does not enter the north-east, Raqqa or the Deir ez-Zor corridor. It does not go to Palmyra: the site and the desert road to it were mined, clearance has been running for years, and the honest answer is that it is a separate decision to be taken on clearance certification rather than a stop on a first trip. It stays out of Suwayda and the southern border strip. And it treats the coast as a later addition rather than a default. Check your own foreign ministry the week you travel. This page does not replace it.
Shorter or longer?
Three days east from Homs to the oasis and back, and only when both the desert road and the site itself carry current clearance certification — not before. The Temple of Bel and the Temple of Baalshamin were blown up in August 2015 and the monumental arch in October, and Khaled al-Asaad, who had run the antiquities of the site for some forty years, was murdered there that August at 83. What survives is the colonnade, the theatre, the tower tombs that were not destroyed, and the argument about whether to raise the arch again from its own stones.
Damascus, Maaloula, Homs, Krak des Chevaliers, Hama and Apamea. Cuts Aleppo and the whole limestone massif, removes the two longest driving days, and keeps the route inside a single corridor with the shortest lines back to the Lebanese border.