Travel and Tourism in Jordan

Petra: The Rose-Red City

No account of Jordan can avoid dwelling at length on Petra, the extraordinary archaeological site in the southern highlands that has become one of the most iconic travel destinations in the entire world. Named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in a 2007 global poll and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985, Petra is one of those rare places that consistently exceeds the expectations of visitors who have already seen hundreds of photographs and read dozens of descriptions.

The site's geography begins with the Siq, the narrow sinuous gorge that for most of its history served as the main entrance to the Nabataean city. The Siq extends for approximately 1.2 kilometers from the site entrance dam, a Nabataean structure designed to divert the flash floods that would otherwise sweep through the gorge and into the city, to the first view of the Treasury. The walls of the Siq rise in places to over 80 meters above the narrow path, and their tortured layers of pink, cream, and ochre sandstone create a constantly changing play of light and shadow. In the walls you can see the remains of the Nabataean water channels that carried water from the spring of Ain Musa through the gorge to the city, a remarkable feat of hydraulic engineering that supplied one of the most important cities in the ancient world. Votives niches carved in the rock face, and the worn ruts left by the wheels of ancient carts, remind you that this was once a busy thoroughfare through which the wealth of the ancient world flowed.

The Treasury, Al-Khazneh in Arabic, is without question one of the most spectacular architectural creations of the ancient world. Carved from a single face of cream and rose-colored sandstone, its facade rises to 40 meters and is organized in two stories of extraordinary elaboration. The lower story presents a Doric entablature above six Corinthian columns, while the upper story breaks into a central tholos, a circular temple-front, flanked by two half-pediments bearing figures that represent a combination of Nabataean and Hellenistic religious iconography. The urn that crowns the central tholos is pockmarked with bullet holes, the result of a long tradition among local Bedouin of shooting at it in the hope of dislodging gold coins believed to be hidden within. The Treasury's interior is a single large rectangular chamber cut deep into the rock, undecorated and somewhat anticlimactic after the elaboration of the facade, though the experience of standing in that cool stone room knowing you are inside one of the greatest monuments of the ancient world is unforgettable.

The exact purpose and date of the Treasury's construction are uncertain, but the current scholarly consensus suggests it was constructed in the first century BC as the funerary monument of a Nabataean king, possibly Aretas III or Aretas IV. The name Treasury derives from the Bedouin tradition that it contained the treasure of a pharaoh, the same conflation with Egyptian legend that gave rise to the bullet holes in the urn.

Beyond the Treasury, the city of Petra unfolds across a broad valley and the surrounding cliffs in a fashion that rewards multiple days of exploration. The Street of Facades is a long section of cliff face lined with carved tomb facades of varying sizes and elaboration, their geometric decoration suggesting a date earlier than the Treasury's Hellenistic exuberance. The Nabataean Theater, carved from the hillside immediately beyond, could accommodate approximately 4,000 spectators and demonstrates the degree to which the Nabataean elite embraced the cultural forms of the Hellenistic Mediterranean world.

The Royal Tombs, carved high in the eastern cliff face of Jabal al-Khubtha, are among the most impressive monuments in all of Petra. The four principal tombs, the Urn Tomb, the Silk Tomb, the Corinthian Tomb, and the Palace Tomb, represent different periods and styles of Nabataean funerary architecture. The Urn Tomb is the most accessible and historically significant of the four, a vast facade surmounting a series of vaulted chambers that served as cisterns in the Byzantine period when the tomb's interior was converted into a church. The Palace Tomb is named for its resemblance to a multi-story Hellenistic palace facade, though the upper stories were never completed and show the rough rock from which they were to have been carved.

The colonnaded street that forms the backbone of the lower city reflects the Roman replanning of Petra after the annexation of 106 AD. Along its length stood the great nymphaeum, or monumental fountain, and numerous civic and commercial buildings. The Byzantine church discovered at the northern end of the colonnaded street in the 1990s yielded one of the most significant recent archaeological discoveries at Petra: a collection of carbonized papyrus documents that provide a remarkable window into daily life in Petra in the sixth century AD, centuries after the Nabataean kingdom had become a distant memory.

Qasr al-Bint, whose name means Castle of the Pharaoh's Daughter in Arabic local tradition, is in fact the only major freestanding structure in Petra and represents the principal temple of the Nabataean religious complex in the city center. Unlike everything else at Petra, Qasr al-Bint was built rather than carved, using dressed sandstone blocks in a style that blends Hellenistic and Near Eastern architectural traditions. It dates to the late first century BC and was dedicated to the principal Nabataean deity Dushara and his consort the goddess Al-Uzza.

The Monastery, Al-Deir in Arabic, is many visitors' favorite monument in all of Petra, and reaching it is an adventure in itself. The climb from the city center involves ascending approximately 800 rock-cut steps carved into the hillside, a journey of about 45 minutes to an hour depending on fitness level and the number of stops to photograph the view. The effort is abundantly rewarded. The Monastery's facade is even larger than the Treasury, rising to 47 meters in height and 50 meters in width, making it technically the largest carved monument at Petra. Its design is simpler than the Treasury, with less elaborate detail, but its sheer scale and the dramatic mountain setting give it an awesome quality. The carved urn at its summit is large enough that a person can stand comfortably inside it. From the ridge behind the Monastery, the views across the surrounding mountains toward the Wadi Araba and the distant Negev Desert are among the finest in Jordan.

The High Place of Sacrifice is reached by another long stairway climb, this one ascending to the summit of Jabal al-Madhbah, the mountain of the altar, where the Nabataeans conducted their open-air religious ceremonies. The summit retains the carved altar platforms, drainage channels for sacrificial blood, and libation basins that constituted the sacred precinct, and the view from the summit across the entire valley of Petra, with the Treasury far below and the surrounding mountains stretching to the horizon, is magnificent.

Petra by Night is an experience offered three evenings per week in which the Siq and the area in front of the Treasury are lit by approximately 1,500 candles placed in paper bags. Visitors sit on the ground before the Treasury while a local musician plays traditional music and serves Bedouin tea. The atmosphere is genuinely magical, with the candlelight playing across the carved facade of the Treasury and the narrow walls of the Siq, though the experience has become crowded in peak season and requires careful timing to appreciate properly.

Little Petra, known in Arabic as Al-Baydha and located a few kilometers north of the main Petra site, is a smaller version of the same phenomenon: a narrow canyon carved into the sandstone with a series of carved facades and chambers. Less visited than the main site and free to enter, it offers a more intimate experience of Nabataean rock-cut architecture. Adjacent to Little Petra, the site of Ain Ghazal, not to be confused with the Amman suburb of the same name, is associated with a Neolithic settlement and provides evidence for very early human occupation of the area.

The Bdoul Bedouin tribe, who are the traditional custodians of the Petra landscape and whose ancestors inhabited the caves and carved chambers of the ancient city until they were relocated to the village of Umm Sayhoun by the Jordanian government in 1985, maintain a strong presence in the Petra Archaeological Park as guides, horsemen, and vendors. A visit to Petra that involves some engagement with the Bdoul people, whether riding one of their horses or donkeys through the Siq, hiring a guide for an off-trail hike to the High Place of Sacrifice, or simply sharing tea in one of the informal gatherings that still occur in the site, provides a human dimension to the experience that the monuments alone cannot supply.

Jordan's UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Jordan has been recognized by UNESCO with six World Heritage designations that collectively represent some of the most significant cultural and natural heritage in the entire world. Petra, designated in 1985, is the country's most famous World Heritage Site and one of the most visited archaeological sites in Asia. Qasr Amra, designated in 1985, is recognized for the extraordinary quality and significance of its Umayyad frescoes. Quseir Amra, which is the common alternative spelling, and the other desert castles associated with it are recognized as representing a critical period in the development of Islamic art and architecture.

Um er-Rasas, Kastrom Mefa'a, designated in 2004, preserves the most complete and significant collection of Byzantine and early Islamic mosaic pavements in Jordan, including the extraordinary floor of the Church of Saint Stephen. The site also contains a remarkable early Byzantine tower with a chapel at its top, a type of structure associated with early Christian monasticism.

Wadi Rum Protected Area was designated in 2011 for its outstanding combination of natural desert landscape and cultural heritage, including the rock inscriptions and petroglyphs that document thousands of years of human presence in the desert.

Baptism Site of Jesus Christ at Bethany Beyond the Jordan, designated in 2015, preserves the site where according to the Gospel of John the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist took place. The site on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, opposite the Israeli and Palestinian West Bank site of Qasr el Yahud, preserves an extraordinary concentration of archaeological remains from the Byzantine period and later, including the remains of churches, monk cells, and baptismal pools that served the pilgrimage traffic to this sacred site.

The As-Salt City and the Urban Residential Architecture, designated in 2021, recognizes the small city of As-Salt in the highlands west of Amman as an exceptional example of late Ottoman and early modern Levantine urban architecture. The city preserves a remarkable collection of multi-story limestone townhouses built between 1870 and 1930, when As-Salt served as the administrative center of the region, with yellow limestone facades decorated with elaborate arched windows that represent a synthesis of Ottoman, European, and local architectural traditions.

Nature Reserves and Ecotourism

Jordan's Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, established in 1966 as one of the first conservation organizations in the Arab world, manages a network of nature reserves that protect habitats ranging from the Mediterranean forests of the north to the coral reefs of the Red Sea. These reserves provide habitat for some of the region's most significant wildlife populations and increasingly offer visitor experiences that complement the country's archaeological tourism.

The Wadi Mujib Nature Reserve, centered on the dramatic gorge through which the Wadi Mujib cuts from the highland plateau to the Dead Sea shore, offers one of Jordan's most thrilling outdoor experiences: the Siq Trail, a slot canyon hike through the cold rushing waters of the wadi that requires wading and sometimes swimming through pools between narrow canyon walls. The hike ends at a waterfall in the upper reaches of the canyon and is possible only in spring and summer when the wadi is not in flood. The reserve also protects populations of Nubian ibex, caracal, striped hyena, and sand fox, and the surrounding cliffs support breeding populations of Egyptian vultures, Bonelli's eagles, and other raptors.

The Shaumari Wildlife Reserve, located near the Azraq oasis in the eastern desert, was established specifically for the reintroduction of wildlife that had been hunted to local extinction in Jordan. The oryx, a large antelope whose striking black and white coloration and long straight horns made it the likely origin of the unicorn legend, was reintroduced to Shaumari in 1978 from a captive population maintained by zoo breeding programs. The reserve now holds a self-sustaining population of Arabian oryx, as well as reintroduced populations of ostriches and Onager wild asses, and serves as a source population for wider reintroduction efforts across the Arabian Peninsula.

The Aqaba Marine Park, established in 1997, protects the most significant coral reef habitats along Jordan's brief Red Sea coastline. The park encompasses approximately 23 kilometers of coastline and extends offshore to a depth of 50 meters, covering the reef habitats that support the extraordinary diversity of Red Sea marine life. Regular patrols enforce the prohibition on destructive fishing practices within the park boundaries, and mooring buoys provided for dive boats prevent anchor damage to the reef. The park has been recognized as one of the better-managed marine protected areas in the Red Sea region, and its relative success has been cited as a model for similar initiatives in neighboring countries.