Petra

For centuries Petra existed mainly in local Bedouin knowledge and old texts, unseen by European travelers, until the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt talked his way in in 1812 by posing as a Muslim pilgrim — the disguise mattered because outsiders weren't otherwise let anywhere near the site. What he found had been a real, and surprisingly late, Nabataean achievement: this wasn't some ancient city stretching back to biblical antiquity, but a settlement the Nabataeans built up from around the 4th century BCE — the first solid historical reference to a thriving community there dates to 312 BCE — before it grew into their kingdom's capital by the 2nd century BCE.

What kept a city that size alive in the desert wasn't luck, it was plumbing. The Nabataeans engineered pipe channels along mountainsides with a slope calibrated to roughly four degrees, precise enough to move water more than five miles from its source without pumps. Three separate systems — one running through the Siq from the Ain Mousa spring, another from Ain Braq, a third from the Wadi Mousa — fed a network of dams and rock-cut cisterns that both stored drinking water and protected the city from the flash floods that periodically tear through the surrounding canyons, sustaining an estimated population of 20,000 to 30,000 people in one of the driest parts of the region.

Given that, the famous facades carved into the cliffs read less as decoration for its own sake and more as the visible top layer of a much larger hidden system of tunnels, dams and channels that made the city possible at all.

Getting there

32 km from Ma'an. Ramon International Airport (ETM) is about 78 km away.