One of the finest private mineral collections in the world, in a university basement, and almost nobody knows it is there.
MIM opened in 2013 in the basement of the Saint-Joseph University campus in Badaro, and it is the most unexpectedly excellent thing in Beirut.
It holds around 2,000 minerals from some 70 countries, selected from a private collection of many times that number assembled over three decades by the Lebanese engineer and businessman Salim Eddé, who founded the software company Murex.
Mineralogists rate it among the finest private collections in the world.
Why it works
Two reasons.
The specimens are exceptional. These are not teaching samples; they are the best-formed and best-coloured examples of each species that could be obtained, many of them from mines that are now closed or exhausted.
The display is exceptional. Black cases, fibre-optic lighting engineered specimen by specimen, and enough space around each object to look at it. The effect is closer to a jewellery collection than to a geology cabinet, and it is deliberate.
The presentation is bilingual and there is a clear introduction to crystallography for people who arrive knowing nothing, which is most visitors.
What to look for
Azurite and malachite from Tsumeb in Namibia and from Morocco.
Elbaite tourmaline from Brazil and Afghanistan, in colour gradients.
Rhodochrosite, fluorite, wulfenite, vanadinite, and a wall of quartz varieties.
Gold and silver in natural crystalline form, which very few people have seen.
The fossil gallery
Added later, and it is Lebanon-specific and genuinely important.
Lebanon has some of the most significant Late Cretaceous fossil fish beds in the world, at Hjoula, Haqel and Nammoura — around 100 million years old, with exceptional preservation. Fish, shrimp, octopus with ink sacs intact, and some of the earliest known specimens of several groups.
The Nammoura deposits in particular have yielded fossils with soft tissue preserved, which is very rare.
There is also Lebanese amber, which is among the oldest amber in the world containing insects — around 130 million years — and predates the more famous Baltic and Dominican deposits by a very long way.
Practical
Charged, modestly, with a reduced rate for students.
Closed Mondays; check the hours, which have changed with the economic situation.
Two hours, and children are generally captivated by it, which is not always true of museums here.
It is a fifteen-minute walk or a short taxi from the National Museum, and doing both in a day is the best museum day in Beirut.
Badaro itself is a pleasant neighbourhood with a good run of restaurants and bars on Badaro Street, and it is a sensible place to eat afterwards.
More Museums
National Museum of Beirut
The collection survived fifteen years on the front line because the director sealed it in concrete.
Sursock Museum
A Venetian-Ottoman villa given to the city as a modern art museum, wrecked by the port blast and reopened in 2023.
American University of Beirut
A green campus falling down a hillside to the sea, with the third oldest museum in the Middle East on it.