Petra

Where it sits. Petra lies in a bowl of eroded sandstone in southern Jordan, about 240 kilometres south of Amman along the King's Highway and 130 kilometres north of Aqaba. The ruins occupy a basin at roughly 800 to 1,300 metres above sea level on the eastern flank of Wadi Araba, the rift valley running from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea. The rock is Umm Ishrin and Disi sandstone, banded in rust, cream, violet and grey by iron and manganese, soft enough to carve with iron tools and hard enough to hold a moulding for two thousand years. The modern town of Wadi Musa sits above the entrance; the Bdoul Bedouin, who lived in the tombs until a resettlement programme in the mid-1980s, now occupy the village of Umm Sayhoun on the northern rim.

The city that traded in water. Petra was the capital of the Nabataeans, an Arab people who moved from herding and caravan raiding into control of the incense route carrying frankincense and myrrh north from southern Arabia. Their wealth is visible less in the tombs than in the hydraulics: an estimated 200 cisterns, dams and a ceramic pipeline system that carried spring water from Ain Musa, some seven kilometres east, at a controlled gradient into the city, with settling basins to drop the silt. The great dam at the mouth of the Siq diverted flash floods into the Wadi Muthlim tunnel, and its modern rebuild does the same job today. Rome annexed the kingdom in AD 106 under Trajan, and Petra continued as a provincial city until earthquakes in 363 and 551 wrecked its buildings and the trade routes shifted to sea lanes and Palmyra. Europeans lost track of it entirely until the Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt talked his way in disguised as a pilgrim in August 1812.

On screen. Petra's screen fame rests almost entirely on one sequence. Steven Spielberg filmed the closing act of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade here in 1988, riding his cast down the Siq so that the facade of Al-Khazneh appears as the temple of the Grail at the end of the Canyon of the Crescent Moon. Everything past the doorway — the three trials, the pillared Grail chamber, the collapse — was built on stages at Elstree in England, because the real chamber behind that facade is a plain, empty, roughly square room. The tank chase earlier in the film was shot in the Tabernas desert near Almeria in Spain, not in Jordan. Michael Bay returned to Petra for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), and produced the geography error the site is now stuck with: his characters walk from the Giza pyramids to Petra as though the two were neighbours, when they are about a thousand kilometres and an international border apart. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997) also used the Treasury facade, to considerably less effect.

What you actually see today. The approach is a 1.2-kilometre walk down the Bab as-Siq past the Djinn Blocks and the Obelisk Tomb, then into the Siq itself — a fault-split gorge about 1,200 metres long, in places three metres wide and 180 metres deep, still paved in stretches with Roman flagstones and lined with the channels that carried drinking water along both walls. Al-Khazneh appears at the end of it in a sliver. Beyond, the valley opens: the Street of Facades, a theatre cut into the rock for around 4,000 spectators in the first century AD and enlarged by the Romans, the colonnaded street, the Great Temple, and Qasr al-Bint, the only major free-standing building still upright. The Royal Tombs — Urn, Silk, Corinthian and Palace — line the eastern cliff and take late afternoon sun. Ad-Deir, the Monastery, is a 45-metre-wide facade at the top of roughly 800 rock-cut steps, a climb of about 45 minutes from the valley floor.

Getting there and timing. Tickets are sold at the visitor centre in Wadi Musa; a multi-day pass costs barely more than a single day and two days is the realistic minimum to walk the main axis and one high route. Horses on the first stretch are included in the ticket in name only, and carriage rides through the Siq are a source of persistent friction over animal welfare. Petra by Night runs candlelit through the Siq on set evenings. Winter brings cold rain and occasional flash floods that close the gorge; high summer bakes the open valley with almost no shade. The main route to the Treasury is compacted gravel and manageable with assistance, but everything beyond involves sand, steps and gradient.