Syria's largest city and its oldest marketplace, badly damaged and visibly coming back. The citadel reopened in 2025 and half the souq is trading again.
Can you visit Aleppo in 2026?
Yes. The citadel reopened to visitors in September 2025 and draws thousands at weekends, more than nine restored souqs are trading, and tour groups include the city on standard itineraries. Much of the old city remains in ruins and the National Museum is still closed. Every Western government advises against all travel to Syria, which affects insurance.
Aleppo was Syria’s largest city and its commercial engine, a place that grew rich for four thousand years on being where the caravan routes met. It was also the city the war damaged most visibly. Both of those sentences are true at once, and a visit here means holding them together.
What has changed is that Aleppo is open again in a way it was not two years ago. The citadel reopened to visitors in September 2025 after a long closure and now draws up to five thousand people a day at weekends. More than half of the covered souq has been rebuilt. People are back in the old city, trading in shops their families held before 2011.
Everything in Aleppo is organised around the mound in the middle of it. The citadel has been fortified since at least the third millennium BCE and carries work from almost every power that held the city: a Neo-Hittite temple, Ayyubid gates, Mamluk towers, Ottoman barracks. You walk up across a stone bridge over a dry moat and into a gatehouse built to be impossible.
It took heavy damage, closed, partly reopened in 2024, closed again during the offensive of December 2024, and reopened properly on 27 September 2025 with new water and lighting systems. Inside there are winding streets, bath houses, a stepped theatre and a temple area still carrying sandbags from the war. Allow two hours and go early if you want it quiet.
Souq al-Madina is a covered network of more than thirty separate markets running for miles around the citadel, and it was one of the great survivals of the medieval world until a UNESCO assessment found 60% of it significantly damaged and 30% destroyed outright.
Restoration started with Souq al-Saqatiyya in 2019 and has continued since. More than nine souqs have been restored and over 380 shops are trading again. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture has rebuilt 277 of them and returned nearly all to their former owners. Reuters reported in August 2026 that the work had passed the halfway point.
Go in knowing that the restored stretches sell household goods and street food rather than the silk and silver of the old photographs. Many of the original traders are abroad, and getting shops back to the right families has been slow. That does not make it less worth seeing. It makes it a different thing: a market being put back by the people who use it.
North of the old city walls, the historic Christian quarter is a maze of stone lanes, carved doorways and merchant houses built around courtyards. It is the most beautiful walking in Aleppo and the part most visitors underestimate.
It was also hit hard. A series of large underground explosions under Sahat al-Hatab in April 2015 devastated the square and badly damaged Beit Ghazaleh and Beit Achiqbash, two of the finest houses in the city. Crater backfilling began in 2017 and rubble clearance in 2018. Expect restored houses beside ruined ones, and expect to be the only foreigner there.
The National Museum of Aleppo, which holds one of the most important collections of ancient Near Eastern material anywhere, was still shut to the public as of June 2026. A University of Florence programme with Italian government funding is working through the collection under UNESCO supervision, with a plan to rehabilitate one hall for rotating displays. No completion date has been given.
The Baron Hotel, where Agatha Christie and Lawrence stayed, closed in November 2014 and has not reopened. Its owner died in 2016 and AFP found it closed and deserted in December 2024. No restoration has been announced. People do get inside to look, usually through a guide.
Not most of it. A guide of thirty-five years told AFP that more than 60% of the old city’s buildings were devastated to ground zero. The old city held about 120,000 people before the war and holds around 40,000 now. The city overall has gone from roughly three million to about 900,000 residents, with an estimated 1.4 million displaced people on top.
The western districts, Azizieh, Sulaymaniyah, Jamilieh and New Aleppo, came through far better and are where the restaurants, hotels and ordinary city life are. More than 600,000 people returned to Aleppo province in the year to December 2025. The direction is clear even if the distance left is long.
Fortified since the third millennium BCE and rebuilt by almost everyone who held the city. Reopened on 27 September 2025 with new water and lighting. Up to 5,000 visitors a day at weekends.
More than thirty covered markets around the citadel. Over nine have been restored since 2019 and more than 380 shops are trading, 277 of them rebuilt by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and handed back to their former owners.
The old Christian quarter north of the walls: stone lanes, carved doorways and courtyard houses. Beit Ghazaleh and Beit Achiqbash were badly damaged in 2015 and the quarter is still being put back.
The Umayyad mosque of the city, founded in the eighth century, with a vast paved courtyard. Its celebrated eleventh-century minaret collapsed in 2013 and reconstruction from the recovered stones has been a long project.
The great merchant khans, built around courtyards where caravans unloaded. Khan al-Harir reopened in 2021 after restoration with the Aga Khan Foundation, and others have followed.
Laurel and olive oil soap, cut by hand and stacked to cure for months. The oldest continuously made soap in the world, and the one souvenir from Aleppo worth carrying home.
Aleppo is the capital of the kingdom of Yamhad and already one of the great cities of the region, named in the Mari archives.
A Neo-Hittite temple to the storm god Hadad stands on the citadel mound, excavated from the 1990s and still visible.
Alexander takes the city and his successors refound it on a Greek grid as Beroea, a plan still legible in the souq.
Aleppo passes to the Rashidun caliphate and becomes a frontier city between the Islamic world and Byzantium.
Sayf al-Dawla makes Aleppo his capital and its court becomes one of the great literary centres of the Arabic language.
Saladin takes the city, and his son al-Zahir Ghazi rebuilds the citadel into the form you climb today.
Under the Ottomans the city becomes the empire's third, a trade capital with Venetian, French and English merchants resident in its khans.
The Ancient City of Aleppo is inscribed by UNESCO for its continuous occupation and its medieval urban fabric.
Four years of fighting split Aleppo in two and destroyed much of the old city, the souq and the Great Mosque's minaret.
The citadel opens to visitors again, with the markets around it, after restoration of its infrastructure and stabilisation of damaged walls.
Aleppo International is 10 km southeast of the centre and has resumed limited international service. Most visitors still arrive overland from Damascus, about five hours by road.
Latest on routes and airlines →Land crossings from neighbouring countries are widely used. Border conditions change, so check status close to your travel date.
Plan your trip →Requirements vary by nationality. Since January 2025 most Western passports collect a visa on arrival, paid in cash US dollars. Check the current position before booking anything non-refundable.
Common questions →Restored historic homes inside the old walls
Modern amenities, walkable to the main sights
Simple, affordable, and close to everything
The basilica built around the pillar where Simeon lived for decades, once the largest church in the world.
Byzantine villages abandoned and left standing in the limestone hills. Many now shelter displaced families.
A colonnaded Roman street running nearly two kilometres along a ridge above the Ghab plain.
The Crusader castle on the road south, and the single best-preserved building of its kind.
Photographs are being added.
36.2021° N, 37.1343° E
Northern Syria, 380 m up on the edge of the steppe, about 190 km from the Mediterranean at Latakia and 50 km from the Turkish border.
Open in mapTour groups visit the city regularly and the citadel and souqs draw thousands of people at weekends. Conditions have shifted over the past two years and operators adjust itineraries accordingly, so ask one close to your dates. Every Western government advises against all travel to Syria, which affects insurance. Read our safety page before booking.
Two to three. The citadel is half a day, the restored souqs another half, and Jdayde on foot is a morning. A third day gives you Saint Simeon or the Dead Cities. Aleppo is about five hours from Damascus, so a day trip is not realistic.
Partly, and the open part is substantial. More than nine souqs have been restored since 2019 and over 380 shops are trading again, with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture having rebuilt 277 of them. Reuters reported in August 2026 that the overall restoration had passed its halfway point.
Yes. It reopened to visitors on 27 September 2025 after restoration of its water and lighting systems and stabilisation of damaged walls, and it now receives up to 5,000 people a day at weekends. Allow about two hours.
No. It was still closed to the public as of June 2026. A University of Florence programme funded by the Italian government is conserving and digitising the collection under UNESCO supervision, with a plan to rehabilitate one hall for rotating displays. No completion date has been announced.
Visas, safety, flights, and a suggested itinerary, all in one place.
Start planning