Things to Do in Petra: A Complete Guide

Petra is carved into the rose-red sandstone cliffs of southern Jordan's Sharah Mountains, a city that existed for centuries before the Romans arrived and that still surprises visitors who think they know it from photographs. The Nabataeans, Arab traders who controlled the incense routes between Arabia and the Mediterranean, chose this narrow canyon system around the fourth century BCE not for its beauty but for its defensibility and its access to water. They engineered channels, cisterns, and dams into the rock to sustain a population that may have reached thirty thousand at its peak, roughly the size of the modern town of Wadi Musa that now serves as its gateway. Most visitors enter through the Siq, a kilometre-long slot canyon where the walls rise forty metres overhead and the light shifts from amber to violet depending on the hour, until the Treasury facade appears in a vertical sliver that widens with each step. But the Treasury is the opening act. Beyond it, the Street of Facades gives way to the Roman-era colonnaded road, the Royal Tombs cut high into Jabal al-Khubtha, and the Monastery, a forty-five-minute climb up eight hundred rock-cut steps that most guided tours skip because of the heat. The town of Wadi Musa itself sits at roughly a thousand metres elevation, which means winter mornings can be genuinely cold and summer afternoons punishing; experienced visitors arrive at the gate before seven and leave the interior by early afternoon. In the evenings, the restaurants along the main road through Wadi Musa fill with returning hikers eating mansaf and drinking sweet tea, and on certain nights the Siq is lit with hundreds of candles for Petra by Night, a spectacle that works best when you ignore the crowds and look up at the stars visible between the canyon walls.