Home › Landmarks › Wonders of the World
Petra
The rose-red Nabataean city carved into the sandstone cliffs of southern Jordan
Petra appears suddenly. After a walk of more than a kilometer through the Siq, a narrow cleft between cliffs up to 80 meters high, the passage opens onto a temple facade carved straight out of rose-colored rock. That is Al-Khazneh, the Treasury, and it is only the beginning. Petra was the capital of the Nabataeans, Arab traders who grew rich controlling caravan routes for incense, spices and other goods between Arabia, Egypt and the Mediterranean. They carved hundreds of tombs, temples and halls into the sandstone and engineered dams, cisterns and channels that let a city thrive in the desert. Long unknown to the outside world, it is now the defining image of Jordan.
Petra lies in a basin of the Sharah Mountains beside the town of Wadi Musa, about 200 kilometers south of Amman, between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. The Treasury rises about 40 meters, a Hellenistic facade of columns, statues and a stone urn that local legend said held a pharaoh's treasure, which explains the bullet marks on it. Beyond it stretch the Street of Facades, a theater cut into the hillside, the Royal Tombs and a colonnaded street lined with ruined temples. A climb of about 800 rock-cut steps leads to Ad Deir, the Monastery, even larger than the Treasury. The archaeological park covers some 264 square kilometers of canyons and ridges streaked in red, pink and ocher.
The Nabataeans were living in the area by the 4th century BCE, and Petra flourished from the 1st century BCE into the 1st century CE, when the Treasury was most likely carved. Rome annexed the kingdom in 106 CE, and trade routes gradually shifted away. An earthquake in 363 CE wrecked much of the city, which dwindled through the Byzantine era. The Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, traveling in disguise as a Muslim scholar, reached it in 1812 and made it known in Europe. UNESCO inscribed Petra in 1985, and the 2007 New7Wonders vote raised its profile further. Visitor numbers, close to 1.2 million foreign tourists in 2019, collapsed amid regional wars to about 457,000 visitors in 2024 and recovered only partly, to roughly 583,000, in 2025.