On 1 April 1931, the Lebanese engineer Albert Naccache guided a group of touriststo the Qadisha Valley in Northern Lebanon. Nowadays, the Qadisha Valley figures in the World Heritage List of UNESCO, owing to its age-old cedars and monasteries dating back to the early days of Christianity.1 Naccache, however, drew the atten-tion of his visitors to a more recent attraction: the hydro-electrical power plant on the Abu ?Ali River.Albert Naccache’s guided tour to the power plant was depicted in the photographalbum of one such French tourist (fig. 1). On the album pages, the black-and-white memories of this excursion appeared between photographs of pharaonic statues,the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and the Roman ruins of Baalbek. Since these renowned sights show that the tourist had followed the beaten tracks of numerous European travellers to the Arab East, it can be assumed that the visit to the electrical power plant did not indicate some eccentric hobby of hers. Instead, I suggest that the visit was initiated by Albert Naccache, the man wearing a Western suit and necktie in photograph no. 97.In this way, the engineer-cum-tour guide Naccache questions our intuitiveunderstanding of tourist attractions. If sights are commonly understood to be of historical or cultural relevance, remarkable due to their curious difference or seeming authenticity, Naccache’s choice of presenting the local power plant to the group of tourists requires an explanation.2 This excursion suggests that, for actors during the 1920s and 1930s, tourism was not a clearly defined business model they implemented, but rather a resource, the deployment of which remained to be identified.