Few castles are as dramatic as the one that sits on a spur of rock in the coastal mountains of Syria, between two deep ravines. Qal'at Salah El-Din, or Saladin's Castle, takes its name from the Muslim leader who captured it from the Crusaders in 1188 on his campaign along the coast, but the story is much older. The site was fortified in Byzantine times, taken by the Crusaders in the early twelfth century, and strengthened with new walls and towers. The great trench that separates the castle from the rest of the ridge is cut out of solid rock, many metres deep, and in the middle of it a slender needle of stone, about twenty-eight metres high, was left standing to carry the drawbridge. It is one of the great sights of medieval military architecture.
Inside are the remains of a keep, a Crusader chapel, a Muslim palace, a mosque and a water cistern, and the walls look over thick forest, with the sea shimmering in the distance. The surrounding hills are green and wooded, with oak, pine and fruit trees, a fragrant landscape quite unlike the desert that many imagine for Syria. The castle was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2006, along with the Crac des Chevaliers, as one of the finest surviving examples of Crusader and Islamic military architecture.
The country has been through more than a decade of war and its infrastructure and security are still unreliable in many places. Most governments advise against travel, insurance is unavailable, and conditions can change quickly, so anyone who is thinking about visiting should consult current official advice rather than any text like this. The castle's setting in the Jebel Ansariyah range, with winding forest roads between Latakia and the interior, was famed for its beauty, and Latakia, about twenty-five kilometres away, a port city of more than three hundred thousand, and Jableh, a smaller coastal city, were the main service towns.
For now, the castle is better known than visited, and it may be best admired in books and old photographs, until the day when travel becomes possible again.