Petra is the Treasury, the Siq, the Roman road — and then most visitors run out of day and leave. In a site of 264 square kilometers, the standard tourist visit covers perhaps 3 square kilometers. That's not a failure of ambition; it's a failure of information. The maps issued at the entrance show the main route through the valley floor but don't adequately convey the fact that the Nabataean city extends to multiple mountain ridges, remote valleys, a high-place sacrifice altar, a Byzantine church with intact mosaic floors, a 2,000-year-old garden with a swimming pool, and a monastery facade (Ad Deir) that is larger than the Treasury and is visited by approximately 20% of Petra's visitors because it requires a 45-minute climb to reach.
The Nabataean civilization that built Petra was one of history's most remarkable: a Bedouin trading people who became fabulously wealthy controlling the frankincense and spice routes between Arabia and the Mediterranean, who invented a script that became the ancestor of the Arabic alphabet, who engineered a water management system in a desert that collected and stored every drop of seasonal rain, and who carved their city directly into the rose-red sandstone of the Jordanian highlands. Understanding what Petra actually is — a working Nabataean metropolis of 30,000 people that simply stopped being inhabited — changes how you move through it.
These ten hidden corners of Petra require longer days, more physical effort, and a willingness to go beyond the organized tour route. None of them are particularly difficult or dangerous. All of them are exponentially more rewarding than the standard visit on its own.
1. The High Place of Sacrifice
The High Place of Sacrifice on Jebel Madbah is directly above the main Petra valley, reached by 800 steps cut into the sandstone cliff, and is the best single diversion from the main tourist route in Petra. At the summit (1,035 metres, about 200 metres above the valley floor) is a flat-cut rock platform with two ritual obelisks, a shallow basin for ritual blood collection, and a view across the entire Petra valley that explains immediately why the Nabataeans chose this location for their principal outdoor sanctuary. The Treasury, the Colonnaded Street, and the entire valley layout are visible from here in a configuration that makes the urban planning logic of Petra comprehensible for the first time.
The route up is well-worn and safe in dry weather. The descent on the other side of the mountain passes the Lion Triclinium (a rock-carved dining room with a carved lion relief), the Garden Tomb, the Bryntesen Tomb, and the Roman Soldier Tomb before returning to the valley floor near the Theatre. This circular route (up the staircase, over the High Place, down the western descent) covers more of Petra's architectural variety than any other 3-hour walk in the site, and the elevation change provides the spatial orientation that the valley-floor route lacks entirely.
The High Place staircase starts from the path between the Treasury and the Theatre — marked with a small sign. Allow 45 minutes up, 30 minutes at the summit, 60 minutes on the western descent. Total: 2.5-3 hours. Go in the morning (8-11 AM) before the midday heat and before the afternoon clouds that can make the descent slippery. Water and sun protection are non-negotiable at this altitude. The view from the sacrifice platform at 9 AM on a clear December morning — the entire Petra basin in low horizontal light — is the single best visual moment in the entire site.
The two ritual obelisks at the High Place are the most complete examples of Nabataean outdoor cult architecture remaining in Petra. Each obelisk was cut from the living rock rather than built up — the surrounding stone was removed to leave them standing. They stand 7 metres high. The ritual function combined astronomical observation, deity offering, and communal feast — the surrounding triclinia (dining rooms) cut into the nearby rock suggest that the High Place ceremonies involved large community meals after the sacrifice, which explains the social architecture of the site.
2. Ad Deir (The Monastery)
Ad Deir is Petra's largest rock-cut facade — wider and taller than the Treasury, with an urn finial that stands 9 metres high. It was carved in the 1st century BCE or CE as either a royal tomb or a temple and was later used as a Christian chapel (hence "the Monastery"). The walk to reach it is 800 steps up a staircase cut into the rock from the valley near the Qasr Al Bint temple — 45 minutes of steady climbing. The visitor count at Ad Deir on any given day is approximately 15-20% of the Treasury count, which means that almost everyone who enters the main Siq does not make it here. This is inexplicable given what they miss.
The scale of Ad Deir in person is difficult to convey through photographs. The facade is 50 metres wide and 45 metres high. The central doorway, which appears in all photographs as a standard-sized door, is in fact 8 metres high — stand next to it and crane your neck to see the top. The shallow courtyard in front of the facade was a sacred space where pilgrims gathered for ceremonies, and the triclinium rooms cut into the cliff on either side of the courtyard were dining halls for the ritual meals that followed. The setting — a hidden rock bowl above the main valley, reached only through the staircase — created the secrecy and drama appropriate to a major Nabataean sacred site.
The staircase to Ad Deir begins from the large terrace near the Qasr Al Bint Nabataean temple at the far western end of the Petra valley — about 2 km from the Treasury on the valley floor. From the Qasr Al Bint, look for the donkey station and the clearly marked trail going upward. The walk is hot and exposed in summer — go early (before 9 AM in June-August) or in the late afternoon (after 4 PM) to avoid the worst heat. In winter and spring, any time of day is comfortable.
There is a small tea stall at the Ad Deir plateau, run by a Bedouin family who have been making tea here for decades. Mint tea for JD 1.5, sitting on cushions facing the facade. This is not a tourist trap — it's an honest transaction where someone recognized that a person who just climbed 800 steps needs hot sweet tea and made it available. Sit, drink, and look at the facade for 20 minutes in silence. The proportions and the silence reward the attention. Then climb on the rocks to the left of the facade for the side view at the same level as the upper decorative elements — a perspective no standard ground-level photograph has.
3. The Byzantine Church and Its Mosaic Floors
The Byzantine Church at Petra, discovered and excavated in the 1990s and accessible on a 10-minute walk from the Colonnaded Street, contains a set of mosaic floors from approximately the 5th-6th century CE that are equal in quality to the finest Byzantine mosaics in Jordan. The church was built on a Nabataean structure and the transition is visible in the construction — Nabataean masonry at the base, Byzantine construction above. The mosaic floors were buried under a collapse in an earthquake (probably 749 CE) and preserved in extraordinary condition; the nave floor shows personified seasons and geographic figures in the Alexandrian Byzantine iconographic tradition.
More significantly, during the excavation the archaeologists found a cache of 152 papyrus scrolls in a side room — the Petra Papyri, Byzantine-era legal and administrative documents from the 6th century CE that provide an unparalleled window into the daily life of late antique Petra. The documents detail property ownership, tax records, and legal disputes between families whose names (Greek, Nabataean, and Arabic) show exactly the multicultural transition period of the city. The papyri are now in the Jordan Museum in Amman; the church floors remain in situ.
The Byzantine Church site is at the northern edge of the Petra valley floor, 5 minutes walk north from the Colonnaded Street. The site has a protective cover structure (built for conservation) and an excellent small museum explaining the papyri finds and the church history. Entry included in the general Petra ticket. Open same hours as the main site. The quality of the mosaics in this remote location, virtually unvisited compared to the famous Treasury, makes it arguably the most rewarding single cultural site in the entire Petra complex for the art history-oriented visitor.
Adjacent to the Byzantine Church is the Petra Church (also Byzantine, slightly earlier), a second mosaic floor church whose nave mosaic depicts hunting and nature scenes in the same high-quality tradition. The two churches together, taking perhaps 45 minutes to examine properly, constitute a complete picture of the Byzantine period occupation of Petra that completely overturns the common impression of Petra as a Nabataean city that was abandoned after the Roman conquest. Petra was occupied continuously from the Nabataean period through Byzantine and early Islamic times — the churches are the evidence that the standard Nabataean-focused narrative ignores.
4. Jebel Harun (Aaron's Tomb)
Jebel Harun (Aaron's Mountain) is the highest peak in the Petra region at 1,350 metres, and it is said to contain the tomb of the Prophet Aaron (Moses's brother) — a site sacred in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions. A white shrine visible from most of the Petra valley marks the summit. The climb from the valley floor takes 3-4 hours on a well-defined but strenuous trail through a landscape of colored sandstone ridges and deep desert valleys that is completely different from the Petra tourist zone — remote, quiet, and genuinely Bedouin in character.
The summit view is spectacular in every direction: west toward the Dead Sea Rift Valley and the Negev (sometimes visible on clear winter days), north over the Petra basin and the surrounding highlands, east toward the Jordanian desert plateau, and south toward Wadi Rum and the Saudi border. The shrine itself is a simple whitewashed domed structure maintained by the Bdul Bedouin community. The tradition here predates Islam — Aaron died and was buried on a mountain on the journey from Egypt to Canaan, and this site was identified with the biblical narrative by the first Islamic scholars who mapped the Holy Land geography.
The trail to Jebel Harun starts from the valley near the Qasr Al Bint temple and is most easily navigated with a Bedouin guide (JD 25-40 for the full day, arranged through the Petra visitor center or through the Bdul village at the site entrance). Allow a full day: 4 hours up, 30 minutes at the summit, 2.5 hours down. Bring 3 litres of water per person, sun protection, and trail shoes. The trail is not signposted and involves several route choices that a guide makes straightforward and an independent hiker makes complicated.
The Bedouin guide community around Petra maintains a traditional knowledge of the landscape, the plants, and the history that has been transmitted orally for generations. A day with a Bedouin guide on Jebel Harun is an education in desert ecology, Nabataean landscape use, and the history of the region that no book adequately conveys. The guide knows which plants are medicinal, which ridgelines have water cisterns, and which rock faces have Nabataean inscription graffiti from the 1st century CE that no archaeologist has documented. This is a legitimate knowledge system and worth compensating properly.
5. Petra's Water Management System
The Nabataeans engineered an elaborate water collection system for a city of 30,000 people in a desert receiving less than 100mm of annual rain. The system — rock-cut channels, ceramic pipes, cisterns, dams, and settling pools — is visible throughout the Petra valley for anyone who knows to look for it. Most visitors walk directly beside these channels without recognizing them for what they are. The Siq itself is flanked by two Nabataean water channels for its entire length — one on each side — that carried water from the Wadi Siyagh spring system into the city. These channels are visible in the Siq wall: look for the rectangular grooves 50 cm above floor level that run continuously along both walls.
The most impressive single water infrastructure feature at Petra is the Wadi Muthlim tunnel — a 40-metre rock-cut tunnel that diverts the Wadi Muthlim flood course away from the Siq. Before the tunnel was cut, the Siq was periodically flooded by flash floods coming down the wadi. The Nabataeans cut the tunnel to redirect the floodwater, protecting their ceremonial approach route. The tunnel entrance is visible at the north end of the Siq from the road above — the scale of the cutting, done entirely by hand, for the purpose of redirecting a seasonal flood, is engineering ambition that still impresses 2,000 years later.
The Petra Archaeological Park offers a specialized Water Management Tour (JD 10, booked at the visitor center) that visits the main water infrastructure features with a guide who can explain the engineering. Available Tuesday and Thursday at 8:30 AM. The tour visits the Siq channels, the main reservoir above the city (Wadi Siyyagh), and a reconstructed section of the ceramic pipe system that delivered pressurized water to the city's fountains and wealthy households. This tour radically changes the experience of everything else you see at Petra — the city stops being mysterious rock carvings and becomes a comprehensible urban infrastructure.
The cistern network above the main valley floor is most easily visited via the trail to the High Place of Sacrifice. As you climb, notice the smooth-cut basins in the rock surfaces — these are rock-cut cisterns ranging from drinking-vessel size to large community cisterns holding several hundred cubic metres. The total cistern capacity at Petra (estimated from documented cisterns) was approximately 30,000 cubic metres — enough to supply a city for several months without rain. This storage capacity allowed Petra to sustain its population through the long dry summers that would otherwise have made the site uninhabitable.
6. Little Petra (Siq Al-Barid)
Siq Al-Barid, 8 km north of the main Petra visitor center, is a secondary Nabataean settlement sometimes called Little Petra. The site is free (no ticket required, unlike main Petra), takes 1-2 hours to walk through, and contains rock-cut triclinia (dining rooms with carved bench seating), Nabataean tombs, and a painted room (the only remaining example of Nabataean fresco painting in the region) in a scale-model version of the main Petra landscape. The site was likely the caravanserai area where the trading caravans and their animals rested and were provisioned before entering the city proper.
The painted room at Siq Al-Barid is the key discovery here: the upper walls of a triclinium are decorated with painted grapevines, putti (cherub figures), birds, and flying erotes — a Hellenistic-style decorative program applied to Nabataean architecture in the 1st century CE. The painting is faded but legible, and the iconographic choice is remarkable: the grape vine is both a symbol of Dionysus (whose worship the Nabataeans adopted) and a reference to the wine trade that made Nabataean merchants wealthy. The room was a dining room for the prosperous; the painting was meant to create a pleasurable atmosphere for a meal.
Siq Al-Barid is accessible by taxi from Wadi Musa town (JD 8-10 return, 15 minutes). The entrance is unsigned and the site is managed minimally — there's a parking area and a path into the siq. Entry is genuinely free. Combine with the Beidha Neolithic village (1 km from Siq Al-Barid) — one of the world's best-preserved Neolithic settlements, 7,000 BCE, where the circular and rectangular house foundations are clearly visible and the sequence of Neolithic architectural evolution (from circular to rectangular plans) is documented in a single site. Also free, also unvisited.
The walk between Siq Al-Barid and main Petra's back entrance (via the Al Barid valley trail) takes about 2 hours through open Jordanian highland landscape — the colors of the sandstone here range from cream to deep red and include the specific banded formation that Nabataean artists used for pigment. The trail is clear and the route is used by Bedouin families. This approach to Petra from the north provides a different first impression of the site — less theatrical than the Treasury reveal in the main Siq, more spatial and geological, and equally valid as an introduction to what Petra actually is.
7. The Colonnaded Street at Dawn
The Colonnaded Street at the center of Petra's main valley was the cardo maximus — the main Roman commercial street — of the city after Rome annexed the Nabataean kingdom in 106 CE. The column bases that line the street for approximately 400 metres (the columns themselves have fallen, except for a few reconstructions) belonged to a covered market colonnade that housed the shops and exchanges of a prosperous provincial city. At dawn before other visitors arrive, the column bases in the early horizontal light, with the Urn Tomb and Silk Tomb on the ridge above lit in rose and amber, compose the classic Petra photograph that has never been taken properly because the midday crowds always occupy the street.
At the eastern end of the Colonnaded Street stands the Temenos Gateway — a 2nd-century CE monumental arch that marked the entrance to the sacred precinct of the Nabataean god Dushara. The gate reconstruction (one complete arch bay has been rebuilt) allows you to understand the original gateway scale: it was as wide as the street and as tall as the cliff face above. The Nabataean temple and its sacred enclosure behind the gate led to the Qasr Al Bint — "Palace of the Pharaoh's Daughter," the only Nabataean freestanding building (rather than rock-cut) that survives to meaningful height in Petra.
The Qasr Al Bint is the least-photographed major monument in Petra. It stands at the far western end of the valley — 2.8 km from the Treasury on the valley floor — and receives perhaps 30% of the visitors who see the Treasury. Yet architecturally it's an extraordinary object: a freestanding Nabataean temple of the 1st century BCE, built in dressed ashlar masonry, reaching 23 metres in height on the remaining walls. The temple was dedicated to Dushara (the chief Nabataean deity) and possibly to the Egyptian goddess Isis — the dual dedication was typical of Nabataean religious syncretism.
The western end of the Petra valley (Qasr Al Bint, the Nabataean museum, the garden tomb area) is a 45-minute walk from the Treasury that rewards visitors who pace themselves. Most people reach the Theatre and the Urn Tomb and consider themselves to have "done Petra." They have done perhaps 20% of it. The western end on a quiet weekday morning, with the Edom mountains behind the Qasr Al Bint and the colored sandstone ridges catching early light from the east, is the Petra that the site's photographic reputation promises and only the early-departing visitor finds.
8. Petra's Outer Siq (Beyond the Treasury)
Almost every visitor walks the main Siq from the entrance to the Treasury, photographs the Treasury, and either returns or continues into the main valley. Very few continue into the Outer Siq — the canyon beyond the Treasury that continues for another 500 metres and contains the Royal Tombs: the Urn Tomb, the Corinthian Tomb, the Palace Tomb, and the Sextus Florentinus Tomb. These four facades, carved into the eastern cliff face in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, represent the largest grouping of high-quality Nabataean and early Roman funerary architecture in the site.
The Urn Tomb is the most important single facade in this group. The facade itself is beautiful — a classical temple front in the Nabataean style — but the interior is what distinguishes it: a hall 18 metres wide and 16 metres deep, entirely cut from the living rock, with the specific sandstone banding creating natural polychrome decoration on the walls. The Byzantine community converted the Urn Tomb into their cathedral in 446 CE (a Greek inscription commemorates the dedication), adding nave seating to the Nabataean hall in a creative re-use that preserved the structure while completely transforming its function.
Access to the Urn Tomb interior requires a steep 10-minute climb up steps from the Colonnaded Street level to the tomb platform. The platform has a colonnaded porch — the famous "porch of the royal tombs" that appears in aerial photographs of Petra. From the porch, the view north toward the Siq entrance and east toward the Wadi Arabah is the best mid-level prospect of the Petra basin. The tomb platform was, in the Byzantine period, the cathedral forecourt — the column fragments visible on the platform are Byzantine porch columns. Layer upon layer upon layer.
Beyond the Urn Tomb cluster, the cliff face continues south into the Outer Siq proper — less frequented, with smaller tombs carved by wealthy private individuals rather than the royal family. The inscription archive here (Greek and Nabataean texts carved into the cliff faces next to the tomb entrances) records the names, titles, and genealogies of the families who commissioned the tombs. Reading these inscriptions (with the help of the Petra Archaeological Park guidebook, available at the visitor center for JD 5) transforms the tombs from decorative objects into documents of a specific community's self-representation.
9. Wadi Muthlim Flash Flood Canyon
Wadi Muthlim is the route the flash floods take when they pour down the mountain above Petra — the floods that the Nabataeans diverted away from the Siq with their tunnel engineering. Walking the Wadi Muthlim in the dry season (April-October) from the tunnel entrance in the upper valley down through the canyon to where it rejoins the main Petra valley is a 2-3 hour expedition through a narrow slot canyon that most Petra visitors never know exists. The canyon walls have been carved by water into smooth, organic curves and the sandstone colors here — deep purple, rust red, and ochre banding — are more intense than anywhere else in the Petra basin.
The Wadi Muthlim approach also passes several ancient cisterns, a carved Nabataean water channel, and some inscription graffiti (Nabataean, Greek, and later Arabic travel inscriptions) that were made by people passing through this canyon on the alternative route into Petra before the main Siq was developed. This was an entrance route used for heavy cargo animals and for the local population who used the canyon as a shortcut between the outer settlements and the city valley.
The Wadi Muthlim trail is not signposted and requires wading through a narrow section that may be knee-deep after any rain — check conditions at the Petra visitor center before attempting it. A local Bedouin guide (JD 20-30) is recommended for the first visit. The entry point is from the road that passes the Siq entrance, heading uphill toward the Wadi Muthlim bridge — visible on Google Maps. Under no circumstances attempt this canyon if there is any rain in the region or rain forecast within 48 hours; flash floods are fast, powerful, and fatal.
The combination of Wadi Muthlim in the morning (the canyon light is best between 9 and 11 AM) with Ad Deir in the afternoon (the facade catches western light from 3 PM onward) constitutes the single best day at Petra for visitors who have already done the standard Treasury-Theatre-Colonnaded Street route. Both are away from the main tourist flow and both require physical effort that is rewarded at a rate higher than almost anything else in the site.
10. Bdul Village and Petra's Living Community
The Bdul (or Bdoul) community are the Bedouin tribe who lived in the Petra caves until 1985, when the Jordanian government relocated them to the new purpose-built village of Umm Sayhoun above the site to allow archaeological work. The Bdul are Petra's indigenous community — they have lived in and around the Nabataean caves for at least fifteen generations, using the rock-cut tombs as livestock pens and dwelling spaces, and maintaining oral knowledge of the landscape, the cisterns, and the routes through the Petra hills that archaeologists have only recently begun to document formally.
The Bdul resettlement is one of the complicated heritage-versus-people stories that appear wherever UNESCO World Heritage Sites intersect with indigenous communities. The Bdul were moved for their own benefit and for conservation — but many continued to work in the site as guides, horse and donkey handlers, and tea sellers, maintaining their economic and cultural connection to the landscape. The village of Umm Sayhoun (adjacent to the back road entrance to Petra) has a community center where Bdul women sell traditional embroidery and where the oral history project is based.
Hiring a Bdul guide (JD 25-40 for a full day) rather than an independent agency guide is both financially beneficial (the money goes directly to the community) and experientially superior — the Bdul guides know the site with a spatial intimacy that maps and guidebooks cannot replicate. Ask specifically for a Bdul guide at the Petra visitor center or through the Umm Sayhoun community office. The guide will show you the specific caves where their family lived, the water sources they maintained, and the routes through the highlands that the Nabataeans and then the Bdul used for 2,000 years consecutively. This is oral heritage in its living form.
The view of Petra at sunset from the Umm Sayhoun ridge — the entire Petra basin in full western light with the colored sandstone at maximum saturation — is the view the Bdul saw from their doorways for centuries and that the tourist infrastructure has never adequately marketed. You can reach the Umm Sayhoun viewpoint by taxi from Wadi Musa (JD 5 to the ridge road) or on foot from the back entrance to the Petra site via the track that leads uphill from the Qasr Al Bint. No entry fee from this direction after the site closes at 6 PM.
