Baatara Gorge Waterfall drops through three natural stone bridges stacked one above the other, then disappears into the mountain. It does come back: the water resurfaces at springs further down the same limestone. All of this is the work of slow dissolution — rain and snowmelt eating into Jurassic limestone for millions of years, hollowing out a shaft 240 metres deep and leaving arches at three separate levels in a single mass of rock. At full spring flow a cascade of 90 to 100 metres pours down behind the bridges before falling on into the dark; from the lip to the floor of the pothole, the water covers about 255 metres. Lebanese call it Balouh Balaa; the French bio-speleologist Henri Coiffait, who brought it to Western attention in 1952, named it the Gouffre des Trois Ponts — the chasm of the three bridges.
The falls sit at about 1,150 metres, near Balaa village on the Lebanon Mountain Trail between Laqlouq and Tannourine. A path drops from the plateau in roughly fifteen minutes, and the scale only registers on the way down: moss has turned the bridges green, the limestone runs orange and grey, and a silver thread of water slips between the arches into the shaft. Spray drifts back up out of the hole and the noise fills the gorge. Timing decides everything here. The waterfall runs on snowmelt, so it is worth checking the season before you drive: come at the wrong time of year and you will find three bridges standing over a dry hole. A visitor centre and café opened above the gorge in 2017 and the crowds came with them, but the path down is still rough, and the wet rock above the drop is slippery and unfenced.