Aqaba

Where it sits. Aqaba occupies the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, the eastern arm of the Red Sea, at the southern tip of Jordan and the southern end of the Wadi Araba rift. It is the country's only seaport and its only coastline — roughly 27 kilometres of it, of which a fraction is public beach. The setting is unusual: from the corniche you can see four countries at once. Eilat's hotel towers stand a couple of kilometres west across the bay in Israel, the Sinai mountains of Egypt close the far side, and the Saudi coast runs south along the eastern shore. Granite and sandstone mountains rise directly behind the town to over 1,000 metres, so the city occupies a narrow shelf between rock and water. The population is around 150,000, and since 2001 the whole area has operated as the Aqaba Special Economic Zone, with lower duties that explain the shopping traffic from Amman.

A very old port. The site has been in use for at least five thousand years; Chalcolithic copper smelting has been excavated at Tall Hujayrat al-Ghuzlan north of the modern town. Biblical Ezion-Geber and later Ayla stood here, and the early Islamic town of Ayla, founded in the seventh century as a planned walled settlement on the Egypt-to-Arabia pilgrim road, has been excavated in the middle of the modern beachfront — its gates, walls and street grid are visible in a fenced enclosure between two hotels, one of the more startling juxtapositions in Jordan. The Mamluk fort near the corniche was rebuilt in the early sixteenth century under Sultan Qansuh al-Ghuri and later garrisoned by the Ottomans. Next to it flies the Flagpole of Aqaba, at roughly 130 metres one of the tallest freestanding flagpoles anywhere, carrying the flag of the Arab Revolt.

On screen — and the mistake almost everyone makes. Aqaba's place in film history rests on a battle it never hosted on camera. On 6 July 1917, Arab forces led by Faisal and Auda abu Tayi, with T. E. Lawrence, took the Ottoman garrison here by attacking overland from the desert, from the landward side the Turkish guns could not turn to face. David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) turns that into the film's central set piece — and shot none of it in Jordan. The production built a full-scale replica of Ottoman Aqaba, some 300 buildings' worth, in a dry riverbed behind the beach at Playa del Algarrobico near Carboneras in Almeria, Spain, and filmed the charge across Spanish sand in autumn 1961, with the seaward-pointing guns constructed for the shot. Jordan supplied the desert riding around Wadi Rum and Jebel Tubeiq; Seville stood in for Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem; Morocco carried later battle work. Travellers who arrive in Aqaba looking for the film's town are looking on the wrong continent, and the real place — a working container port with a corniche of cafes — bears no resemblance to it.

Underwater, which is the actual reason to come. The Jordanian Red Sea coast has fringing reef running almost continuously south of the port, with around 25 named dive sites reachable by a short boat ride or directly from shore. The Cedar Pride, a Lebanese freighter deliberately sunk in 1985 on the orders of King Abdullah II when he was a naval officer, lies on its port side in 15 to 27 metres and is thickly grown with soft coral. An M42 Duster anti-aircraft tank was placed in six metres of water in 1999 and sits upright on sand, reachable by snorkellers. In 2019 the Aqaba Marine Park opened an Underwater Military Museum: a decommissioned C-130 Hercules, tanks, an ambulance and troop carriers arranged as a mock battlefield between 15 and 28 metres. Reef life includes lionfish, moray, blue-spotted rays, and seasonal whale sharks.

Getting there and timing. King Hussein International Airport is 10 kilometres north with domestic flights from Amman and seasonal European charters; the Desert Highway drive from Amman takes around four hours, Petra two, Wadi Rum one. A ferry runs to Nuweiba in Egypt, and the Israeli border crossing north of town is a 15-minute taxi. Summer temperatures regularly exceed 40C with high humidity from the gulf, which is why the season here runs opposite to Europe's. Public beaches are busy and modest dress is expected; the hotel and club beaches south of the port are where swimming and diving are organised. The corniche and the newer waterfront developments are level and largely step-free, but older streets and the fort are not.