Car rental in Tartus, delivered to the coast
Tab is based in Damascus and that is where the cars live, which is why our car rental Tartus service runs on delivery rather than a counter. We drive the car down and hand over the keys wherever suits you — an address in the city, a hotel entrance, the corniche, or the port gate before you catch the Arwad boat. Delivery to Tartus is $50, added to your quote before payment, and you choose the meeting point when you book.
The road down from Damascus is about 250 km and takes roughly three hours: the motorway north to Homs, then west through the gap in the coastal mountains. The last twenty minutes drop out of the hills and the sea arrives all at once. Coming from the north instead, Latakia is a much shorter run, around 90 km along the coast road.
Tartus — written Tartous at least as often as Tartus, and locals use both — is compact enough to walk, and badly connected to everything you actually came to see. Arwad is the first trip most people make: Syria's only inhabited island, three kilometres offshore, twenty to thirty minutes by motorboat from the port. There are no cars on Arwad, so you leave yours on the mainland and walk onto the boat. Half a day covers the boatyards, a fish lunch and the citadel.
Inland, the country changes fast. Safita is about 25 km southeast, up in green hills, with the white Crusader keep of Chastel Blanc rising out of the middle of the town. Keep going east and you reach Krak des Chevaliers — Qalaat al-Husn — roughly an hour from Tartus by way of Safita. Both are comfortable half-day drives with a car and genuinely awkward without one.
In the city itself, the old quarter is built inside the walls of the Crusader cathedral of Our Lady of Tortosa, and its lanes are too tight to be worth attempting. Park along the corniche and walk in; the seafront and the fishing harbour will take care of the evening.