This is your destination guide for Jordan.
This is your destination guide for Amman & Jerash
📍 Part of JordanA capital with almost no old town, and a Roman city an hour north with almost nothing missing.
The reality: Amman is a young city on very old ground. It was Rabbath Ammon to the Ammonites, Philadelphia to the Ptolemies and the Romans, and then, for most of a thousand years, essentially nothing — a ruin field with a few families in it. A Circassian community settled here in 1878, the Hejaz railway arrived, Emir Abdullah made it his capital in 1921, and after that the population was set by other people's wars: Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, Iraqis after 2003, Syrians after 2011. Greater Amman now holds well over four million people, close to half the country. That's why it has no medina and why it feels the way it does — a city assembled fast, in white limestone, out of everyone who had to leave somewhere else.
What survived from before is stacked on one hill. The Citadel has an Ammonite wall, a Roman Temple of Hercules with a marble hand the size of a person lying beside it, a Byzantine church and an Umayyad palace complex with a domed audience hall — four civilisations inside one fence, with the whole city in a bowl below. Down in Al-Balad, the downtown, the Roman Theatre still seats 6,000 into a hillside, and boys play football on the forum in front of it in the evening.
An hour north, Jerash is the other half of this page and arguably the better half: a Roman provincial city that was buried in sand for centuries and came out with its colonnades standing. You get a triumphal arch, an oval forum ringed by 56 columns, a paved main street with the ruts still in it, two theatres, a hippodrome and a temple to Artemis whose columns visibly sway in the wind. Two days does Amman and Jerash properly. Three lets you add Ajloun, Umm Qais and As-Salt, which is the trip people don't plan and then talk about afterwards.
Three hills, one museum and a downtown. Everything else in Amman is where people live, and you should walk some of that too.
Start at the Citadel (Jabal al-Qal'a) in the late afternoon, when the light is on the columns and the call to prayer comes up from four directions at once and doesn't quite synchronise.
The Temple of Hercules is three standing columns and the famous marble hand — from a statue that would have stood twelve metres — and the Umayyad Palace behind it has a reconstructed dome you can stand under. The small archaeological museum on the hill is worth the ten minutes.
Below, the Roman Theatre is cut into the hillside so steeply that the top row is a genuine hands-on-knees climb, and there are two small folklore museums in the wings.
The real point of downtown is the streets around it: the gold souk, the vegetable market, the juice stands, Duke's Diwan — a 1924 merchant's house open free to anyone who climbs the stairs — and the King Abdullah I Mosque with its blue mosaic dome, one of the few in Amman that admits non-Muslims.
The Jordan Museum, ten minutes away, is the one unmissable indoor hour in the country: the Ain Ghazal statues, plaster figures with bitumen-rimmed eyes made around 7,000 BC and among the oldest large human statues ever found, and part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the Copper Scroll — the only one written on metal, and a list of hidden treasure that nobody has ever found.
Then go up the hill. Jabal Amman around Rainbow Street is the visitor's Amman: cafes, a few galleries, Souk Jara on summer Fridays, and views. Jabal al-Weibdeh next door is the better one — quieter, arty, Paris Circle, and Darat al Funun in three restored 1920s houses with a Byzantine church in the garden and no entry fee.
One of the best-preserved Roman provincial cities anywhere, plus a castle built against the Crusaders and a town looking into three countries.
Jerash takes three hours minimum and rewards four. You come in under Hadrian's Arch, built for the emperor's visit in 129 AD, past the hippodrome, and through the south gate into the Oval Plaza — an asymmetric forum ringed by 56 Ionic columns that is unlike anything else in the Roman world.
From there the cardo maximus runs 800 metres north, still paved, with chariot ruts worn into the stone and manhole covers over the drains beneath.
The South Theatre has acoustics good enough that you'll usually find the Jordanian bagpipers playing in it — an army tradition inherited from the British mandate, and one of the odder and better things that happens to you in this country.
The Temple of Artemis is Jerash's high point: the columns are set on lead-cushioned bases so they flex, and a guide will slip a knife blade into the gap to show you a 40-tonne column moving in the wind.
Ajloun Castle (Qal'at ar-Rabad), 30 minutes west, was built in 1184 by Saladin's commander to watch the iron mines and the Crusader forts across the valley — a Muslim castle built against the Crusaders, which is the reverse of what most visitors assume.
Umm Qais — Roman Gadara — is an hour further north and built in black basalt: a colonnaded street, a theatre, an Ottoman village on top of it, and a terrace looking down onto the Sea of Galilee, with the Golan Heights, Israel and Syria all in one view. As-Salt, half an hour west of Amman, got its UNESCO listing in 2021 for its yellow-limestone Ottoman merchant houses. Almost nobody stops there.
Oak forest, a long-distance trail that starts up here, and hills that are green for three months a year.
The best meal in Jordan costs about a euro and you eat it standing up.
Hashem, in a downtown alley, has been doing falafel, hummus, ful and mint tea around the clock for decades, has fed the royal family, and still costs about JD 2 a head.
Fifty metres away, Habibah sells kunafa nabulsieh — shredded pastry over melted white cheese, soaked in sugar syrup, cut from a giant tray and handed to you on a paper plate — and the queue in the alley moves fast. Do both, in that order, in one evening. That's the meal people remember.
Sit-down Jordanian food is worth a proper night too: mansaf, the national dish — lamb in a sauce made from jameed, dried fermented sheep's-milk yoghurt, over rice and flatbread, eaten from a shared tray with the right hand — is the one to book. Then maqluba (rice, meat and fried aubergine cooked in a pot and flipped upside down), musakhan (sumac and onion chicken on flatbread), fatteh, and mezze built on mutabbal, tabbouleh and kibbeh. Sufra on Rainbow Street and Fakhr el-Din in a 1950s villa are the two obvious good ones; Jafra, above a downtown street, is the cafe to sit in for two hours.
Alcohol is legal, taxed hard and unevenly available: bars in Jabal Amman and Weibdeh, licensed restaurants, liquor shops downtown, and nothing at all in most local eateries. Arak — aniseed, cut with water and ice until it clouds — is the local drink, and Carakale, Jordan's first craft brewery, is up in Fuheis, a Christian town northwest of the city where the alcohol question simply doesn't arise. During Ramadan (roughly mid-February to mid-March in 2027, sliding about eleven days earlier each year) daytime eating in public is off and the city comes alive spectacularly after sunset.
Spring and autumn, as everywhere in Jordan — but Amman is the one place where winter is genuinely cold and summer is genuinely bearable.
March to May is the best of it: 18–28°C, the northern hills green, wildflowers around Jerash and Ajloun, and the columns without the July glare. September to November is the mirror image and slightly quieter.
June to August runs 30–35°C in the day, which sounds worse than it is — the altitude means evenings drop to something pleasant and the whole city eats outside — but Jerash is unshaded stone and should be done before ten or after four.
December to February catches people out. Amman is 800–1,100 m up, it rains hard, and it snows most winters, sometimes enough to shut roads and the airport for a day or two. Bring a coat; the buildings are built for summer and heating is patchy.
Two calendar notes: the weekend is Friday–Saturday, and Friday morning shuts the city down almost completely — museums and sites open late or not at all, and it's the best time in the year to have the Roman Theatre to yourself. The Jerash Festival in July fills the ancient site with music and crowds for a fortnight and is either the reason to come or the reason not to.
Take taxis in the city, take a driver north, and don't hire a car for Amman itself.
Queen Alia airport is 35 km south of the city; the Airport Express bus runs roughly every 30–60 minutes to the 7th Circle and North Terminal for a few dinars, and a taxi is JD 20–25. In the city, yellow taxis are cheap and mostly metered — insist on the meter — and Careem and Uber both work well and remove the argument entirely.
Amman's roads are organised around numbered circles (1st through 8th along Zahran Street), and every address you're given will be relative to one of them; learn that system and the city suddenly makes sense. It is very hilly, and the walk that looks like 600 metres on a map is 600 metres and 80 vertical.
For Jerash, buses run from the North Bus Station (Tabarbour) for a couple of dinars and take about 90 minutes; most visitors instead take a taxi or driver for the day at JD 50–80, which lets you add Ajloun, or Umm Qais and As-Salt. Hiring a car makes sense for the rest of Jordan and very little sense inside Amman — pick it up on the way out of town.
One border note: the Jordan Pass visa waiver does not work if you enter via the King Hussein / Allenby Bridge from the West Bank. It's fine at the airports, at the northern Sheikh Hussein crossing and at Wadi Araba by Aqaba.
Compare rental cars →Pick a hill. It decides your whole stay, because you will not casually walk between them.
Jabal Amman (Rainbow Street / 1st Circle) — the best base for most people: walkable to cafes and bars, ten minutes downhill to downtown, small hotels and restored houses, and a taxi rank when the hill wins.
Jabal al-Weibdeh — quieter, artier, more residential, excellent bakeries and small guesthouses. Where you'd stay on a second visit.
Downtown (Al-Balad) — cheapest, loudest, and the only place you can roll out of bed into Hashem. Some genuinely good budget hotels, some very basic ones.
Abdali / Shmeisani — glass-and-steel new Amman: the international chains and the business hotels. Efficient, characterless, good if you're in and out via the airport.
A night in the north — Ajloun Forest Reserve cabins or an Umm Qais guesthouse, if you want the northern loop at a walking pace rather than as a long day trip.
Amman is the cheap part of an expensive country. Sites here cost a few dinars rather than Petra's fifty, street food is genuinely inexpensive, and taxis are close to free by European standards — but hotel rooms, restaurant dinners and alcohol are priced like a Mediterranean capital. A beer can cost more than a full meal, and often does. If you're doing Petra at all, the Jordan Pass (JD 70–80) covers everything on this page and waives the JD 40 visa; if you're somehow only visiting the north, individual tickets are cheaper.
Prices in 2026 Jordanian dinars (≈ 0.82 JD to €1); the dinar is pegged to the US dollar, so the euro price moves with EUR/USD. Cards are widely accepted in Amman and rarely outside it — carry cash for downtown, taxis and anything in Jerash or Ajloun. A 10% service charge plus 16% sales tax is normally already inside restaurant menu prices. Museums and sites close earlier in winter and on Fridays, so check the day's hours before building a route around them.
Go if you want a Roman city with the chariot ruts still in the paving, a 9,000-year-old statue with painted eyes, and kunafa in an alley for a dinar. Skip if you're looking for an old town, you can't face hills, or you were planning to see Amman from a taxi window — it doesn't work that way here.
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