City by city
Where you can go, city by city
What each place is, whether it's currently safe to visit, and how long it's worth. Damascus and the west function largely normally for visitors; other areas do not — this is the honest split as of October 2026, so check again before you travel. Times are driving times, which in Syria means checkpoints included.
Aleppo
The Citadel still dominates everything, and from its walls you see the scale of both the loss and the repair work. Sections of the covered souk and the Great Mosque have reopened after painstaking reconstruction. Aleppo gave its name to a whole style of cooking and to the pepper that defines it; the kebabs here — particularly the cherry kebab in season — are the reason many Syrians rate it above Damascus at the table. Laurel-oil soap is still cut and stamped by hand in workshops you can visit.
- Climb the Citadel first, to read the city before walking it
- Ask which souk lanes reopened this month — it keeps changing
- A soap workshop in the old city, where laurel soap cures for months
- Status
- Open; reconstruction zones fenced
- Worth
- 2–3 days
- From Damascus
- 4–5 hours
- Best time
- April–June, September–October
This is the underrated risk. Contamination is widespread in former front-line areas, around Palmyra, and along old defensive lines. The rule is simple and absolute: stay on hard-surfaced roads and worn paths, never enter a ruined building or an open field, and never take a shortcut across ground you have not seen someone else walk.