Damascus Governorate, Syria — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Damascus Governorate known for?

The governorate consists only of the city of Damascus, the capital of Syria, so its name and the city's stand for almost the same place. It is one of the fourteen governorates of the country. Rif Dimashq Governorate wraps entirely around it, holding the countryside the capital itself does not.

Where is Damascus Governorate?

Damascus Governorate is the smallest kind of province: a single city drawn as a governorate. It consists only of the city of Damascus, the capital of Syria, and its boundary is essentially the edge of the built-up capital. The governorate has no hinterland of its own.

Where the city ends, the governorate ends, with none of the fields, hills or villages that a larger province would hold. This is a city, not a region. One other governorate wraps around all of it.

Rif Dimashq Governorate encloses Damascus Governorate completely, wrapping around every side and taking in the countryside, the outlying towns and the open land beyond the capital. The capital sits inside it like an island. That arrangement makes Damascus Governorate an urban core set within a rural ring, the two governorates fitting together as city and country.

It is one of the fourteen governorates of Syria, and by far the most concentrated. The result is unusual even among the fourteen governorates of Syria. From edge to edge it is the capital and little else, a province the size and shape of one city.

What is Damascus Governorate like?

Life in Damascus Governorate is city life, from edge to edge. Because the governorate is nothing but the city of Damascus, the capital of Syria, its culture is simply the culture of that capital, with no separate rural identity of its own. The whole province is essentially downtown.

What happens in the streets of Damascus is what happens in the governorate, since the two cover exactly the same ground. As the seat of the capital, the governorate carries the weight of a national centre. The public life of Syria, its offices, its gatherings and its daily business, concentrates here in the one city that fills the province.

Everything national runs through it. The surrounding Rif Dimashq Governorate holds the countryside and the towns beyond, but the customs, the crowds and the pace here are wholly those of the capital. Arabic is the language of its streets, as across the country.

In the end the culture of Damascus Governorate is not a region's culture at all, but the civic life of the capital of Syria, drawn tight within a single boundary.

What is the history of Damascus Governorate?

Damascus Governorate is a modern administrative unit, not an ancient land. It is one of the fourteen governorates that Syria is split into, a form of local government laid over the capital. Its territory is the city itself.

Because the governorate is simply the city of Damascus drawn as a province, its history is really the history of that capital of Syria, with the administrative line of Rif Dimashq Governorate added later around it.

What is the climate of Damascus Governorate?

Damascus Governorate has the hot, dry climate of the capital it contains. Summers are long, hot and rainless, while winters are mild with a little rain. Well back from any coast, the city and its governorate keep a dry inland climate through the year.

The surrounding Rif Dimashq Governorate shares the same dry pattern. Spring passes quickly.

How do you get to Damascus Governorate?

To reach Damascus Governorate is to reach Damascus. The governorate is the capital and nothing else, so the roads and routes of Syria that lead to the capital lead straight into it. There is no other way in.

Every approach crosses the surrounding Rif Dimashq Governorate first, since that province rings the capital on all sides. An arrival in Damascus is an arrival in the governorate itself.