About the museum

The story

A boy, a spear, and the sea

Jamal Younes grew up on the peninsula of Tyre, where the old Phoenician harbour still opens onto the Mediterranean. He was in the water before he could properly remember it — diving from the rocks with a hand-spear, in winter as in summer, by night as by day. In the years before the 1980s the sea off Tyre was still generous: the fishing was orderly, the outfalls few, and every dive turned up something he had never seen before.

What stayed with him was not only the beauty of it but a worry. He wanted the next generation to know what lived along this coast before pollution and neglect made it a memory. He did not yet know how.

Learning to keep what the sea gives

The answer came, unexpectedly, in an anatomy hall. Studying orthodontics in Romania, the young Dr. Younes watched preserved specimens keep their form year after year, and understood that the same care could be given to the creatures of the sea. A chance friendship with a professional taxidermist turned the idea into a craft; he came home to Tyre with a diploma in taxidermy alongside his dental degree.

Marine animals are the hardest of all to preserve. Their skin is delicate, dries fast and loses its colour within hours, so every specimen had to be worked on the day it was landed — cleaned, treated, reshaped and painted back to life by hand. He learned by doing. Soon fishermen were knocking on the clinic door at dawn with whatever the nets had brought up that was strange, rare or beautiful, and the collection outgrew the house, then the clinic.

From a private passion to a public museum

The collection went on show for the first time in 1999, during “Beirut, Arab Capital of Culture”, and again that year at the Ehden Festival. In June 2001 it filled the Lebanese University’s Fanar campus for Environment Day, and a month later the UNESCO Palace in Beirut. The crowds — and the letters — convinced him it deserved a home of its own.

The Lebanese Marine and Wildlife Museum opened in the heart of Tyre in 2001. Within eighteen months it was on the Ministry of Tourism’s official map, with road signs pointing the way, and the Ministry of Education was encouraging every school and university in the country to visit (Decree 32/2002). Buses came from Akkar, Tripoli, Zahle and the Koura. The National Geographic Society wrote to say it wanted to make a film about the museum. For a one-man project built on weekends, it was more than anyone had expected.

The hard years

Lebanon does not make things easy for its institutions, and the museum was no exception. There were years when support that had been promised never arrived, when the collection — by then the largest of its kind in the Middle East — had simply run out of room, and when keeping thousands of fragile specimens safe was a quiet, daily labour that few people saw. The museum kept going anyway, because the collection mattered more than the circumstances.

A new home in Jeita

Around 2015 the museum moved north to Jeita, on the road that leads to the famous grotto, into a building large enough to show the collection as it deserved to be shown. Today more than 2,000 species and over 5,000 specimens fill seven halls: the predators and mammals of the Lebanese mountains, the birds of the forest, the reptiles of the desert, seashells and corals, the great marine hall with its forty-odd shark species, dolphins and sea turtles, a hall of fossils and minerals — and, alive and well, the Live Reptile Zoo.

The museum works with the Shark Trust and other regional and international partners on the study and protection of Mediterranean marine life, and remains what it was on day one: a place built by one person to educate and inspire.

Wildlife of Lebanon

The next chapter is bigger than the building. With this website the museum is starting the first national archive of Lebanon’s flora and fauna — every species, with its scientific name, its status on the IUCN Red List, where it lives, and whether you can see it in our halls. It begins with the specimens in the collection and grows with every record added and every sighting sent in by visitors, students and researchers.

Explore. Learn. Preserve. That was the idea in 1999, and it still is.

“I was always surrounded by the sea. Ever since I was a child I practised underwater fishing, in winter as in summer, by night as by day.” — Dr. Jamal Younes, founder

“I built it to educate and inspire.” — Dr. Jamal Younes, founder