Petra

Petra served as the capital of the Nabataean Kingdom starting around the 4th century BC, a desert trading civilization wealthy enough to carve entire monumental facades directly into the surrounding sandstone cliffs rather than simply building on top of them. As regional trade routes shifted over the following centuries, the city faded from wider knowledge, known and used by local Bedouin communities but effectively lost to the outside world for hundreds of years.

That changed in 1812, when Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt talked his way into the site disguised as a Muslim scholar, reintroducing Petra to Western audiences after centuries of near-total obscurity. The site's rediscovery story is almost as well known today as the ruins themselves, a reminder that "lost" cities are often only lost to whoever's telling the story.

Reaching the city's most famous structure, Al-Khazneh, or the Treasury, means walking through the Siq, a narrow gorge roughly 1.2 kilometers long with walls rising up to 80 meters on either side. The Treasury's facade appears suddenly at the end of that passage, a moment of reveal that's become one of the most recognizable sequences in travel photography, and one familiar to many visitors before they arrive thanks to its appearance in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."

Beyond the Treasury, Petra holds over 800 individual monuments, tombs, temples, a Roman-style theater carved into the rock, and the Monastery, reached by a climb of roughly 800 uneven steps that thins the crowds considerably compared to the areas near the main entrance. Most visitors need a full two days to cover both the well-known sites and the quieter trails branching off from them.

Petra by Night, held several evenings a week, lights the walk through the Siq entirely with candles, ending at the Treasury with traditional music performed in the open square in front of it. It's a genuinely different experience from a daytime visit, trading the site's scale and detail for atmosphere, and most visitors treat it as a complement to a full daytime exploration rather than a substitute for one.