page_title: Tyre, Lebanon
section_title: Demographics
hierarchical_section_title: Tyre, Lebanon / Demographics
caption_attribution_description: English: View westwards in Tyre/Sour, South Lebanon: The Sharafeddine Mosque (Shia, left) next to the Old Mosque (Sunna, right), with the Franciscan Church of the Holy Land (left) and the Maronite Catholic Cathedral "Our Lady of the Seas" (right) in the background
context_page_description: Tyre is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, though in medieval times for some centuries by just a tiny population. It was one of the earliest Phoenician metropolises and the legendary birthplace of Europa, her brothers Cadmus and Phoenix, as well as Carthage's founder Dido. The city has many ancient sites, including the Tyre Hippodrome, and was added as a whole to UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites in 1984.
  The historian Ernest Renan noted:
  One can call Tyre a city of ruins, built out of ruins.
  Today Tyre is the fifth largest city in Lebanon after Beirut, Tripoli, Aley and Sidon, It is the capital of the Tyre District in the South Governorate. There were approximately 200,000 inhabitants in the Tyre urban area in 2016, including many refugees.
context_section_description: An accurate statistical accounting is not possible, since the government of Lebanon has released only rough estimates of population numbers since 1932. However, a 2016 calculation by UN HABITAT estimated a figure of 201,208 inhabitants, many of them refugees:
  The city of Tyre has become home to more than 60,000 Palestinian refugees who are mainly Sunni Muslim. As of June 2018, there were 12,281 registered persons in the Al Buss camp, 24,929 in Burj El Shimali and 34,584 in Rashidieh. In the ramshackle "gathering" of Jal Al Bahar next to the coastal highway, the number of residents was estimated to be around 2,500 in 2015.
  In all camps, the number of refugees from Syria and Palestinian refugees from Syria increased in recent years. Tensions developed since these new arrivals would often accept work in the citrus and banana groves "for half the daily wage" that local Palestinian refugees used to earn.
  In early 2019, some 1.500 Syrian refugees were evicted from their informal settlements around the Litani river for allegedly polluting the waters which are already heavily contaminated.
  The Lebanese nationality population of Tyre is predominantly Shia Muslim with a small but noticeable Christian community. In 2010, it was estimated that Christians accounted for 15% of Tyre's population. In 2017, the Maronite Catholic Archeparchy of Tyre counted about 42,500 members. Most of them live in the mountains of Southern Lebanon, while there are just some 500 Maronites in Tyre itself. The Melkite Greek Catholic Archeparchy of Tyre – which not only covers the District of Tyre in the South Governorate but also neighbouring areas in the Nabatieh Governorate – registered 2,857 members in that year.
  Tyre is known as "Little West Africa". Many families in Tyre have relatives in the Western Africa diaspora, especially in Senegal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivoy Coast and Nigeria. In Senegal, most immigrants originated from Tyre. Member of the Tyrian communities there are "primarily second-, third-, and fourth-generation migrants, many of whom have never been to Lebanon." One of Tyre's main promenades is called "Avenue du Senegal".
  
  As there were an estimated 250,000 foreign workers – mostly female Ethiopians –  under the discriminatory Kafala system of sponsorship in Lebanon by 2019, there is also a large community of African migrants in Tyre. They are mainly Ethiopian women who work as domestic servants. Some of them celebrate church service at the Greek-Catholic Cathedral of Saint Thomas, which has devoted a chapel on its compound to Tyre-born Saint Frumentius, the first bishop of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. In April 2014 one Ethiopian made sad headlines in an apparent suicide in Tyre: 
  "Media reports said the woman had fled last week from her employer’s home. Security forces later detained the Ethiopian and returned her to her employer."
  
  The 2016 UN HABITAT profile found that 
  "Approximate calculations suggest that 43% of Lebanese in Tyre urban area are living in poverty."
caption: Religious coexistence: Abdel Hussein Mosque (Shia, left), Old Mosque (Sunna, right), Franciscan Church (left) and Maronite Cathedral in the background
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