This paper takes a close look at the promotional prints issued by the newly formed National Council for Tourism in 1960s Lebanon. It unpacks the discursive and aesthetic implications of visual culture by historically examining the tourism prints through two intersecting frameworks, that of modernity in its global cultural dimension in conjunction with that of nation building. Lebanon, as expressed in the texts and images of brochures and posters issued by the Tourism Council, is represented as part of a Mediterranean geography where modern leisure practices and historic sites of ancient civilizations are given central stage. My analysis relates this first to the modernizing agenda of the state and its desire to position Lebanon on the global map of emerging mass tourism, particularly the one flourishing on the European side of the Mediterranean basin from the French Riviera all the way to the Greek islands. I discuss how the Tourism Council sought to substitute a preexisting imaginary of Lebanon as a regional mountain summer resort with the modernity of Mediterranean seascapes. At the outset, this approach could be situated within a modernizing framework of the Lebanese state that looked towards the West for a tourism model to emulate. However, the lens of global modernity gets complicated once Lebanon’s political history, its creation as a nation-state and ensuing national identity politics are brought to the fore. I hence move to critically interrogate the politics of a Mediterranean geography of belonging, especially in light of its antagonistic relation to contemporary politics of Arab nationalism. My study traces the purported Mediterranean geography back to a dominant imaginary of Lebanon expressed in the discourses of the country’s most influential nationalists. I argue that Lebanon’s 1960s–70s tourism prints, as mass mediated modern artifacts of visual culture, contributed to the discursive formation of a Lebanese subjectivity premised on separatism from the Arab context. The prints circulated an imaginary of Lebanese cosmopolitanism that endorsed a Westernized character of the nation and its people, validating as such popular myths around Beirut, Lebanon’s capital city, as the ‘Paris of the East’.