Travel in Jordan: one long road from Umm Qais to the Red Sea

How visitor numbers rise and fall

More than 5 million visitors entered Jordan in 2004 and spent $1.3 billion. The wars next door then cut the flow: Wikipedia's article on Jordan records a 70% fall in tourist numbers from 2010 to 2016, with recovery from 2017, when Jordan counted more than 3.8 million tourists. Petra alone received 1.2 million visitors in 2019. The pandemic drove the sector's share of output down to 3% in 2020, and the IMF's statement of June 2026 listed a decline in tourism among the effects of the war in the Middle East.

The sources disagree on who comes. Wikipedia's economy article says the bulk of Jordan's tourist trade comes from elsewhere in the Middle East, while Britannica describes visitors arriving mainly from the West to see the biblical sites of the Jordan Valley and Petra. Aqaba fills with Jordanians on holiday weekends, and medical treatment, study and diving on the Aqaba reefs bring visitors of their own.

How a trip runs from north to south

The country is a strip, and the roads follow it. The road from Amman through Ma'an to Aqaba is the main route to the sea, and from Ma'an the Desert Highway continues to Saudi Arabia. The King's Highway follows an older line, a trade road that the Jordan Trail Association traces back to the Moabites, Edomites and Ammonites and that Trajan rebuilt as the Via Traiana Nova after AD 106. A third road runs along the Jordanian shore of the Dead Sea at 393 metres below sea level. Most visitors fly into Queen Alia International Airport, the country's main international airport, whose expansion, completed in 2013, gave it capacity for more than 16 million passengers a year.

The Wadi Araba border crossing has its own rule for visas: visitors who enter there, stay at least two nights and leave by the same crossing have the visa fee waived. Elsewhere the Jordan Pass covers entry to more than 40 sites, Petra, Jerash and Wadi Rum among them, and waives the visa fee for visitors who buy it before arrival and stay two consecutive nights. It is not sold to holders of Arab nationalities, and children under 12 enter the sites free with their parents.

What the north holds between Umm Qais and Amman

Rain and forest are concentrated in the north-west, and so are the Roman cities. Jerash, Roman Gerasa, is known for colonnaded streets, Corinthian arches, theatres and the Oval Plaza; Umm Qais stands on the ruins of Hellenistic and Roman Gadara, another city of the Decapolis. Ajloun has a castle the Ayyubids built against the Crusaders and a forest reserve of 12 square kilometres run by the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature. Umm el-Jimal, once a town on the margins of the Decapolis, is built of black basalt, and some of its houses and towers still stand three storeys high.

Amman itself layers the eras on its hills. The Citadel on a hill in the east of the city holds the Roman Temple of Hercules, Byzantine churches and an Umayyad palace, and below it lie the large Roman theatre, the Odeon and the Nymphaeum. The Jordan Museum is the national museum of archaeology and heritage; the Jordan Archaeological Museum sits on the Citadel, and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts and Darat al Funun show modern art. In the Balqa highlands As-Salt keeps about 650 historic buildings of yellow limestone from its years as a merchant town, and Fuheis has churches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

What lies along the river and the Dead Sea

The baptism site, Bethany beyond the Jordan, lies on the east bank nine kilometres north of the Dead Sea, and UNESCO's listing describes two areas: Tell al-Kharrar, also called Elijah's Hill, and the churches of Saint John the Baptist near the river, with Roman and Byzantine churches, a monastery, hermits' caves and baptismal pools. Christian tradition holds that Jesus was baptised here, and it is a place of pilgrimage.

On the plateau above, Mount Nebo is where the Bible has Moses look over the Promised Land, and Madaba keeps the Madaba Map, a sixth-century mosaic of the Holy Land and Jerusalem. Machaerus, Herod's hilltop fortress, is where tradition places the beheading of John the Baptist. On the shore below are resort hotels, water parks and a public beach. The Mujib reserve protects the gorge of Wadi Mujib, which enters the sea at about 410 metres below sea level, with walls climbing to 899 metres above it in places.

How Petra is entered and what it holds

Petra lies among sandstone mountains cut by passages and gorges, beside the town of Wadi Musa, whose people are largely of the Layathnah tribe. The usual entrance is from the east, down the Siq, a narrow gorge formed by a split in the rock and in places only 3 to 4 metres wide, and the first monument at its end is Al-Khazneh, the Treasury, cut into the cliff in the first century AD and thought to be the tomb of the Nabataean king Aretas IV. Beyond it are the Roman theatre, the Royal Tombs, the High Place of Sacrifice and Al-Dayr, the Monastery, an unfinished tomb facade used as a church in Byzantine times.

UNESCO describes the city as half built and half carved into the rock. It was a caravan city between Arabia, Egypt and Syria, its people supported by dams, cisterns, rock-cut channels and ceramic pipes, and its population reached an estimated 20,000 in the first century. After an earthquake in 551 settled life seems to have ended. Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, a Swiss traveller, reached it in 1812, and it was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1985. Wikipedia's account lists the threats: collapse, flood erosion, salt weathering, poor restoration and the growth of tourism itself, which increased after the New 7 Wonders campaign of 2007. The Bdul, one of the tribes UNESCO names in its listing of Bedu culture, still use the Nabataean cisterns and caves around the site.

What the castles and desert palaces offer

The highland road is lined with fortresses. Karak was the seat of the Crusader lordship of Oultrejordain, and Wikipedia's tourism article dates its castle to the time of Saladin; Shobak, the Crusaders' Montreal, marked the eastern and southern edge of their expansion. The eastern desert holds the lodges and palaces of the Umayyad caliphs. Qusayr Amra, an early eighth-century lodge with a reception hall and bathhouse covered in figurative murals, is a World Heritage Site, and Qasr al-Hallabat and Qasr Kharana belong to the same group.

The Azraq Wetland Reserve, an oasis of pools and seasonal marsh in the eastern desert, is a resting point for birds migrating between Asia and Africa. At Shaumari, a reserve of 21 square kilometres by the society's own figure, created in 1975, Arabian oryx, ostriches, gazelles and onagers are bred. Umm ar-Rasas, a Roman camp that grew into a town, has 16 churches and the mosaic floor of the Church of Saint Stephen, and two square towers that UNESCO takes to be the remains of stylite hermits.

Where the nature reserves can be walked

The Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature runs the reserves that most visitors walk in, and their figures differ a little from other accounts. Dana, which falls from the plateau down to the floor of Wadi Araba, covers 292 square kilometres by the society's figure and 308 by Wikipedia's tourism article, which counts about 600 species of plants, 37 of mammals and 190 of birds there. The society founded it in 1989 and UNESCO classified it as a biosphere reserve in 1998. Mujib, on the Dead Sea shore, takes in the Wadi Mujib gorge and the Karak and Madaba mountains on either side, with over 300 plant species recorded.

In the north, the Ajloun forest reserve of 12 square kilometres lies between 600 and 1,100 metres in Mediterranean woodland, and Dibeen, founded in 2004, protects about 8.5 square kilometres of pine forest. Both are far from the desert sites, and they show a side of the country that the classic route from Amman to Petra and Wadi Rum passes by. Petra has its own museum at the entrance to the site, opened in 2019, with about 300 objects from the region from prehistory to the present.

Why Wadi Rum and Aqaba end the route

Wadi Rum is a protected desert of 74,000 hectares near the Saudi border, a World Heritage Site since 2011 for both its landforms and its human record: narrow gorges, natural arches, cliffs, ramps and caves, with 25,000 rock carvings and 20,000 inscriptions spanning some 12,000 years. Visitors come for guided tours, walking and rock climbing among the sandstone massifs, and for the associations with T. E. Lawrence and with the films shot there. Jabal Umm ad Dami, which the record gives as the country's highest point, stands about 30 kilometres south of Wadi Rum village.

Aqaba is the last stop and the only one on the sea. It has hotels, beaches, protected coral reefs for snorkelling and diving, and the excavated ruins of early Islamic Ayla, a walled town of 24 towers. The Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority counted about 432,000 tourists in the zone in 2006. Winters there are mild.

When the seasons suit a visit

Rain falls from November to April and almost none falls the rest of the year. Summers from May to September are hot and dry, averaging about 32 °C and sometimes passing 40 °C in July and August, while winter in the highlands brings frost and some snow, usually a couple of falls a year in western Amman, and Aqaba stays mild. The rift valley rarely sees either. For a month or so either side of summer the khamsin can blow hot dust out of the desert for a day or more. Spring is when the plants of the uplands and the steppe flower after the winter rain.

The Jordan Trail makes the same trip on foot. It runs more than 675 kilometres from Umm Qais to Aqaba, about 35 days of walking through 75 villages and towns, through the wooded northern hills and Jerash, along wadis and cliffs above the rift, through Petra and across Wadi Rum to the Red Sea. The Jordan Trail Association was formed in July 2015 to develop and maintain it, and Bedouin tribes have helped lay out the sections between Petra, Wadi Rum and Aqaba.

Some customs are worth knowing. Wikipedia's account of Jordanian culture notes that men do not offer to shake hands with women unless the woman offers first, and that photographing women without asking is not acceptable. Visitors' identity documents are checked at sites entered on the Jordan Pass, and the tourism police deal with complaints.