also spelled Wadi El Zayni · elevation ~49 m
Jadra is in the Chouf District of Mount Lebanon, about 36 km from Beirut, about a 29-minute drive. Its closest Chouf neighbours are Sibline (~2.9 km), Rmaileh (~3.0 km) and Wardaniyeh (~3.4 km).
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Jadra — officially Jadra - Wadi El Zayni — is a coastal town in Iqlim el-Kharroub, the seaward side of the Chouf district, Mount Lebanon. It sits on the Beirut–Sidon coastal highway about 36 km from Beirut, its municipality named for both Jadra and the seaside quarter of Wadi el-Zayni, and is one of the seventeen municipalities of the Union of Municipalities of Iqlim El-Kharroub El-Chamali. Its farmland has long been planted with fruit trees, citrus, grapevines, grains, and vegetables.
Jadra is a coastal town in Iqlim el-Kharroub, Chouf district, on the Beirut–Sidon highway 36 km from Beirut and 10 km from Sidon; its municipality also carries the name of the seaside quarter of Wadi el-Zayni. Its farmland is known for fruit trees, citrus, grapevines, grains, and vegetables.
Mufarrij traces the name Jadra to the Aramaic-Syriac GADRA, 'a pool or pond of water', and notes that the village's several springs fit it. For Wadi el-Zayni, a local story holds that the valley was first called Wadi el-Zaniya, 'the valley of the adulteress', after a woman her family killed and left there, and that the name was later softened. Mufarrij could not confirm the story; he reads the name as the Aramaic-Syriac ZAÏNA, 'weapon'.
During the civil war, after Israel occupied the area in 1982, the Mountain War of 1985 drove Jadra's Christians from the town. When they came back in 1991, the parish priest worked with the townspeople to rebuild what the war had destroyed.
2 stone coffins in one rock
Old wells are carved into the rock around Jadra. One tomb holds two deep stone coffins cut into a single mass of rock, and quarry marks beside them show where stone was taken, perhaps for their lids or to build the old olive press nearby.
Source: Mufarrij's encyclopedia
200 m east of the tomb
About 200 m east of the tomb lie the ruins of an old olive press. The foundations of its outer walls still stand, and among the fallen stones its round crushing stone still sits in the west corner.
Source: Mufarrij's encyclopedia
1942 the line was laid
The coastal railway from Haifa to Beirut and Tripoli crosses Jadra by the sea. South African and Australian army engineers laid it in 1942, during the Second World War. The line is long abandoned: Lebanon's last regular trains ran in 1997.
Sources: OpenStreetMap: the railway · Wikipedia: Rail transport in Lebanon
2014 the rebuilt church opened
St George's parish church was destroyed in the war years and rebuilt with a hall beside it. In summer 1997 Bishop Tanios El-Khoury, the Maronite bishop of Sidon, said Mass on St George's feast at the site chosen for the new church. In September 2014 he opened the rebuilt church on behalf of the Maronite Patriarch.
Sources: Mufarrij's encyclopedia · Lebanese Forces website
Jadra's patron saint is St George (Mar Girgis). The town keeps his feast at its parish church, and in April 2024 Archbishop Maroun Al-Ammar, the Maronite archbishop of Sidon, led the feast Mass there.
Sources: Catholic Information Center · OpenStreetMap: the church
2012 shrine unveiled
In 2012 Bishop Elias Nassar, the Maronite bishop of Sidon and Deir el-Qamar, blessed and unveiled a statue of the Virgin Mary in the churchyard. The municipality put it up with the parish priest, he said, to bless people passing by and to stand as a beacon for the people of the area, who live side by side in peace.
Source: Janoubia
Under Ottoman rule, the Iqlim el-Kharroub, the coastal hill country Jadra belongs to, was a subdistrict (nahiye) of the Sidon-Beirut sanjak, with Chhim as its capital.
Source: Wikipedia: Iqlim al-Kharrub
2,500 residents around 2000
Jadra grew noticeably once the war ended. New housing and tourist resorts went up, and by around 2000 about 2,500 people from many parts of Lebanon lived there.
Source: Mufarrij's encyclopedia
Most of Jadra's own people are Maronite or Greek Catholic Christians, and there is a Sunni Muslim minority.
Sources: An-Nahar · Arabic Wikipedia
24 neighbourhoods
Jadra's own people number about 1,000, with 500 voters, and fewer than half of them vote because so many live abroad (figures from 2025); around 2000, Mufarrij counted about 380 voters. Some families left for Australia and Canada during the war. Yet about 14,000 people live in the town today, across 24 neighbourhoods, many of them newcomers from nearby villages, the Iqlim and Beirut who built homes and shops there.
Sources: An-Nahar · Mufarrij's encyclopedia
Mufarrij lists two local groups: Nadi al-Talaa'i, a cultural and sports club, and the Marian Movement (al-Haraka al-Mariamiya).
Source: Mufarrij's encyclopedia
1998 first municipal vote
Jadra elected its first municipal council in 1998, in the first local elections held after the war. The parish priest stood as a candidate, which was debated at the Maronite Patriarchate before he went ahead with Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir's blessing.
Source: An-Nahar
9 council members
Jadra's municipal council has 9 members, among the four smallest of the 17 councils in the northern Iqlim el-Kharroub union. The municipality is listed as Jadra and Wadi el-Zayni. Around 2000 the town's court cases went to Damour, and its gendarmerie post was in Saadiyat.
Sources: UN-Habitat Iqlim booklet · Al-Mouhafaza directory · Mufarrij's encyclopedia
AUL, the Arts, Sciences and Technology University in Lebanon, has a campus on University Street in Jadra, which offers its American University for Humanities degree programmes. Jadra and Wardaniyeh are the two towns in the northern Iqlim union that host a university. The town also has a public primary school for boys and girls.
Sources: AUL · Wikipedia: AUL · UN-Habitat Iqlim booklet · Mufarrij's encyclopedia
1942 founded in Beirut
El Kaissi, a confectioner founded in Beirut in 1942, makes its dragées and chocolates in Jadra's industrial area; over three generations it has grown from a small workshop. A UN-Habitat study names it, as Al Qaisi, among the Iqlim's well-known chocolate makers, alongside Patchi and Al Wafa in Sibline.
Sources: El Kaissi · El Kaissi: address · UN-Habitat Iqlim booklet
$35M invested
Arwan Pharmaceuticals opened a USD 35 million plant in Jadra in December 2013, built to make biotechnology medicines. IDAL, Lebanon's investment agency, called it a landmark for Lebanon and the region.
Source: IDAL
10 km to Sidon by road
Jadra sits on the coastal highway, about 10 km by road from Sidon, around ten minutes' drive, and about 26 km from Beirut's airport, some 22 minutes. This stretch of the highway is known as the Jadra – Wadi el-Zayni highway.
Sources: Route to Sidon · Route to the airport · Lebanon Debate
315 hectares
Mufarrij gives Jadra 315 hectares; the boundary drawn on OpenStreetMap is smaller, about 2.4 km². On land it borders Jiyeh, Barja and Sibline, and the Mediterranean lies to its west.
Sources: Mufarrij's encyclopedia · OpenStreetMap: Jadra
Jadra's farms grow vegetables and citrus, and the village has several springs. Around 2000 its drinking water came through the Barouk water authority's network from the Nabeh es-Safa spring, and its electricity from the power plant in Jiyeh.
Source: Mufarrij's encyclopedia
2 sandy beaches
Mina Beach, a sheltered sandy bay about 130 m long, lies about 1 km from the centre of Jadra. Further south, near Rmaileh, the sandy beach at Wadi el-Zayni runs for about 400 m.
Sources: Beach guide: Mina Beach · Beach guide: Wadi el-Zayni
1977 the gathering began
Wadi el-Zayni, the seaside quarter that shares the municipality's name, is home to a Palestinian refugee gathering. UNDP and UN-Habitat date it to 1977, when Palestinians fleeing the civil war settled on private land; the Palestinian Camps Encyclopedia dates the first arrivals to the mid-1970s, people displaced from the Nabatieh camp that Israel destroyed in 1974, with more after the Tal al-Zaatar massacre in 1976 and the Sabra and Shatila massacre. It is not an official UNRWA camp. Sources differ on where it belongs: An-Nahar counts Wadi el-Zayni as one of Jadra's 24 neighbourhoods, on Sibline's land, while UN-Habitat and the encyclopedia place the gathering under Sibline municipality, with Jadra to its north, and Sibline calls it Lower Sibline.
Sources: UNDP and UN-Habitat · Palestinian Camps Encyclopedia · An-Nahar
10,650 people in 2012
In 1991 a MERIP report found Wadi el-Zayni without a single public building, no mosque, school or clinic, so people went to Sibline or Sidon for every service. By 2012 about 10,650 people lived there, 2,200 of them Lebanese, and around 1,200 more came from Syria after its war began; the encyclopedia, undated, puts it near 20,000. It now has a private school as well as UNRWA schooling for every grade, and one UNRWA clinic with no laboratory or X-ray, so patients still go to Sidon. UNDP has renewed its sewage network.
Sources: MERIP, 1991 · UNDP and UN-Habitat · Palestinian Camps Encyclopedia
registered population ~1,000 · registered voters ~500 · area ~315 ha · ~36 km from Beirut
إسطفان، القزّي، الخوري، حيدر، رمضان، الحدّاد
~36 km from Beirut · ~29 min drive
From Beirut, take the coastal highway south past Damour. Jadra sits on the highway, about 10 km before Sidon.
The town of Jadra is in the Chouf district of Mount Lebanon, Lebanon, about 36 km from Beirut, at around 49 m elevation.
Jadra is about 36 km from Beirut, roughly a 29-minute drive.
Mufarrij traces the name Jadra to the Aramaic-Syriac GADRA, 'a pool or pond of water', and notes that the village's several springs fit it. For Wadi el-Zayni, a local story holds that the valley was first called Wadi el-Zaniya, 'the valley of the adulteress', after a woman her family killed and left there, and that the name was later softened. Mufarrij could not confirm the story; he reads the name as the Aramaic-Syriac ZAÏNA, 'weapon'.
Families associated with Jadra include: إسطفان, القزّي, الخوري, حيدر, رمضان, الحدّاد.
Landmarks in Jadra include St George's Church (Mar Girgis), Shrine of the Virgin Mary, Rock-cut tomb with two sarcophagi, Ruins of the old olive press.
Jadra is one of the seventeen municipalities that form the Union of Municipalities of Iqlim El-Kharroub El-Chamali — the northern half of the Iqlim El-Kharroub belt of Chouf District. The union takes Mazboud as its seat and runs from Jiyeh and Rmaileh on the Mediterranean up to roughly 795 metres at Daraya and Aanout on its eastern, mountainous edge. Within the union, Jadra sits on the coastal strip between Jiyeh and Rmaileh, on the Beirut–Sidon highway.
Source: UN-Habitat Lebanon (2023), A Road Map Towards a Socioeconomic Development Plan for the Union of Municipalities of Iqlim El-Kharroub El-Chamali, funded by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation.
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