Rest & recreation – Clubs find summer’s groove

With the Mediterranean a few feet away, and a table groaning with plates of grilled prawns, it’s hard to picture Oceana beach club as a scene of any duress. Life here among the bronzed and beautiful is good. But in 2006, as owner Nicolas Sawan says, the first Israeli bombs to hit the Dammour area were just a few hundred meters away. “They hit the bridge where we had the Oceana sign,” he says. Beyond the human carnage and destruction wrought by the July war, Lebanon’s tourist heavy economy also took a blow. The initial overall economic cost was estimated at $2.8 billion and the year, which had begun with a record flow of tourists, saw an 85 percent drop from the previous August, according to Tourism Ministry statistics. The owners of Lebanon’s beach clubs, who had been preparing for a bumper season, were hit particularly hard. Sawan, for example,