In 1961, a muezzin of the town of Baalbek recited the call to prayer on an evening in July. The muezzin extended his prayer to last a full twelve minutes, playing over the sounds of the European music coming from the prestigious International Baalbek Festival held in the ruins nearby. Tanks and armed soldiers were stationed around the concert and its cosmopolitan festival-goers, presumably to defend them from the inhabitants of the town. The festival’s rhetoric, however, evoked the supposed benefits of tourism for the local population and their supposed gratitude for the presence of both tourism and the festival. The rise of Lebanon’s tourism industry inspired hopes of a better future and promised development and the equitable distribution of tourism revenues across class and rural-urban divides. After Lebanese independence, the media and the tourism industry framed the growth of tourism as a nationalist project that required all hands on deck. Baalbek, Lebanon’s fifth largest town, boasting the country’s most impressive archaeological site, seemed on track to reap the benefits of tourism development. But did the promises of tourism result in real policies and development projects in Baalbek? This paper interrogates the promises of tourism and the prevailing myth of Lebanon’s golden years of tourism by centering the town of Baalbek as a case study from independence to the Civil War (1943-1975). Using archival correspondence, newspapers, guidebooks, and maps, the paper argues that the rhetoric of tourism failed the inhabitants of Baalbek. The Lebanese state favored tourists and the archeological ruins over the people of Baalbek in its development projects, and neglected the town’s appeals in newspapers for better infrastructure, electricity and public health measures. But beyond such failures, it traces how guidebooks, the International Baalbek Festival and the Lebanese state either rendered the locals invisible, or painted them as the illegitimate custodians of the ruins obstructing the success of Lebanese tourism. Adopting and adapting its own “tourist gaze” (Urry, 1990) classifying Baalbek as commodifiable and profitable heritage, the Lebanese state removed houses and froze building laws, and in the mid-1960s unsuccessfully attempted to remove and relocate the entire town along with its undesirable inhabitants away from the ruins. The paper seeks to recover voices from Baalbek, exploring tourism as a site of contention in which locals at times challenged the industry and its rhetoric through obstructing the Baalbek Festival and writing petitions and appeals.