Little Petra

About Little Petra

Little Petra, also known as Siq al-Barid, is an archaeological site located north of Petra and the town of Wadi Musa in the Ma'an Governorate of Jordan. Like Petra, it is a Nabataean site, with buildings carved into the walls of the sandstone canyons. As its name suggests, it is much smaller, consisting of three wider open areas connected by a 450-metre (1,480 ft) canyon. It is part of the Petra Archeological Park, though accessed separately, and included in Petra's inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is often visited by tourists in conjunction with Petra itself, since it is free and usually less crowded.

Little Petra, or Siq al-Barid, is a Nabataean site about 8 km north of Petra near the town of Wadi Musa, and part of the World Heritage Site that UNESCO listed in 1985. Its Arabic name, "the cold canyon", says it all: a narrow gorge with high walls that let in little sun, so it stays shaded even in summer. The canyon runs for about 450 m and opens into three successive wider areas linked by narrower passages, with facades, temples, cisterns and dining rooms cut into the sandstone walls just as in Petra itself, only smaller and far quieter. It was probably a suburb of Petra and a stopping place for merchant caravans in the 1st century AD, when the Nabataean kingdom was at its height, with rooms to receive traders and their caravans. Its best-known feature is the Painted House (the Painted Biclinium), a dining room reached by a short flight of steps whose ceiling carries a 2,000-year-old fresco in its original colours showing grape clusters, vines, birds and winged children in Hellenistic style, one of the rarest surviving Nabataean paintings, dated between 40 BC and 25 AD. A few minutes away lies Beidha, one of the world's oldest farming settlements, going back to about 7000 BC, and from the far end of the canyon a trail of roughly 6 km leads to Ad-Deir in Petra, known as the "back door".

Where:

Petra, Jordan