Wadi Rum

Where it sits. Wadi Rum is a sand-floored valley system in Jordan's far south, about 60 kilometres east of Aqaba and roughly two hours by road below Petra. The protected area covers about 720 square kilometres of the Hisma desert and was inscribed by UNESCO in 2011 as a mixed natural and cultural property, listed for its landscape and its human record together. The valley floor lies between 900 and 1,000 metres above sea level, and out of it rise isolated massifs of Cambrian and Ordovician sandstone stacked on a granite basement, their walls sheer for 500 to 700 metres. Jabal Ram reaches 1,734 metres; Jabal Umm ad Dami, on the southern boundary near the Saudi frontier, is Jordan's highest point at about 1,840 metres. The sand between the massifs runs from pale buff to deep iron red depending on which rock shed it.

The rock, the water and the people. The sandstone is porous and the granite beneath it is not, so rain that soaks into the towers travels down and emerges as seeps along the contact line. Ain Shalaaleh, high on the flank of Jebel Rum and reached by a scramble above the old rest house, is the best known of these springs and still runs. The Nabataeans built catchments and a small temple at the foot of the same mountain in the first century AD, and their traders left their alphabet on the rock alongside earlier Thamudic hands: Khaz'ali Canyon, a cleft barely two metres wide and a hundred long, carries inscriptions and carved feet within its first fifty metres. Surveys have logged tens of thousands of petroglyphs and inscriptions across the area — ibex, camels, hunters, open palms. The Zalabia Bedouin hold the tourism concession around Rum village; the Zawaideh work out of Disi to the north.

Lawrence, and the film that fixed the image. T. E. Lawrence rode through in 1917 during the campaign that took Aqaba and gave the valley several pages of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which is why the seven-buttressed massif facing the visitor centre now carries that name — applied long after the fact and matching nothing in the book. David Lean brought his production here in May 1961 and worked in Jordan for months with logistical backing from King Hussein, using Rum and the Jebel Tubeiq country for the desert crossings and the tribal camps. The single most persistent error travellers make is looking for Aqaba in these hills. Lean's Aqaba was a full-scale town built in a dry riverbed behind the beach at Playa del Algarrobico, near Carboneras in Almeria, Spain, and the charge on the Turkish guns was filmed on Spanish sand; Seville supplied the Cairo and Damascus interiors, and Morocco the later battle work.

On screen since. Rum has become the default stand-in for other planets, and it is worth being exact about which production shot what here:

• Prometheus (2012) — the approach to LV-223, cut together with Icelandic material filmed at Dettifoss
• The Last Days on Mars (2013) and The Martian (2015) — Martian surface exteriors, with all of Ridley Scott's interiors built in Budapest
• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) — the moon of Jedha
• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) — Pasaana, including the speeder chase
• Aladdin (2019) — desert sequences only; Agrabah itself was built at Longcross in England
• Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024) — Arrakis, shared with desert locations in Abu Dhabi
• Moon Knight (2022) and John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)
• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), which spent four days in Jordan, and Theeb (2014), Naji Abu Nowar's Bedouin-cast drama nominated for the foreign-language Oscar

What you actually see today. Almost everyone enters through the visitor centre near Seven Pillars, pays the reserve fee, then transfers to a Bedouin-driven pickup with bench seats in the bed. A standard half-day circuit takes in Lawrence's Spring, Khaz'ali Canyon, the red dunes below Jebel Umm Ishrin, the small Nabataean temple, Umm Fruth rock bridge — a 15-metre arch that visitors scramble onto unroped — and a sunset point on a dune facing west. Longer trips add Burdah, a natural arch about 35 metres up a slabby ridge that needs a guide and a head for exposure, and the Umm ad Dami summit walk. Camps range from goat-hair tents with shared washblocks to domed transparent pods marketed as Martian habitats, most of them clustered in a handful of licensed sites.

Getting there and timing. The turnoff is on the Desert Highway between Aqaba and Ma'an; a taxi from Aqaba takes an hour, from Petra about two. Nights are genuinely cold from November to March and the wind can rip through open camps. Light is the deciding factor: the sandstone flares orange for roughly forty minutes after sunrise and before sunset, and goes flat and grey in the middle of the day, which is when most day trippers arrive and leave. Staying overnight is the difference between seeing the place and photographing it. Sand, soft ground and pickup beds make wheelchair travel difficult.