Not too far from Petra is Little Petra, also known as Siq al-Barid. Petra gets all the glory and the tourists, but Little Petra is impressive in its own right. It’s also free to visit and not crowded like the main site. We learned quite a bit about the history while we were there but now I’m struggling to piece it together while writing this 3 months later. We were told by our guide at Petra that the large caravans of traders arriving to Petra on camel could not pass through the narrow Siq at Petra and therefore Little Petra was thought to have thrived as a commercial hub.
There were a lot less restrictions on access at Little Petra. The kids were free to run and climb and explore the ruins.
There were a number of Bedouins selling handicrafts and souvenirs but not nearly the amount there were at the main site. We found them very helpful and engaging and while they generally spoke little to no english, they were so friendly and were eager to show us around.
One of the most interesting buildings/caves was located up a staircase carved into the rock. The climb up was a bit nervewracking with the kids (narrow high stairs with no railing) but a very nice Bedouin man showed us the way and helped us up and down. Inside was a room with painted ceiling frescoes. There was no information on site to read about the ruins. I later researched to find out that this was believed to be a dining room with a very rare large-scale example of Hellenistic painting. The inner chamber had beautiful paintings of intertwining vines and flowers. My photos do not do it justice.
I had read in a travel blog about a nearby Neolithic settlement called Beidha near to Little Petra. Settlements of people at this site date back 13000 years to the Natufian period when it was thought to be a seasonal encampment that was used for thousands of years. We couldn’t find any detailed maps or information online but assumed it would be signposted at Little Petra. It was not. We tried to follow Google maps but it took us out of Little Petra and to a nearby valley which was also beautiful but we couldn’t find the ruins.
Eventually we walked far enough that we started to get nervous about getting lost…the landscape was breathtaking but very similar in each direction. We retraced out steps back to Little Petra and then asked one of the guards at the entrance. He pointed us along a different hiking path just outside the entrance to Little Petra. There were no signposts and we walked for probably 30 minutes without even seeing any other people, second-guessing that we had gone the right way.
We eventually spotted the ruins. There was a Bedouin man in a shelter outside the fenced-off settlement ruins. We gave him some money but it wasn’t clear if he had anything to do with the site or was just using the opportunity to hopefully get some money from confused tourists like us. He definitely wasn’t going to get rich from his efforts – we were the only people exploring the site for the whole time we were there.
The ruins of the buildings still present at Beidha are generally from the Neolithic stage. It is believed that this is one of the earliest villages with habitation in the world, dated about 9000 years ago. At that time, this was a fertile valley; very difficult to picture given the current climate. It was abandoned about 8000 years ago but it is not clear whether the inhabitants were invaded and killed or if the valley ceased to be fertile at that time. It was a really interesting place to visit with the kids and surprisingly had a number of placards to explain the history of the site. I don’t remember all the details but I still vividly remember the feeling of touching the walls of the buildings knowing that people had stacked the stones and mortar to build these structures 9000 years ago. Incredible. Hopefully that history lesson also left an indelible memory with the kids.
Petra was an amazing experience for us but as far as a family experience with small kids, Little Petra may have actually been better. It was a more manageable size (so they didn’t complain about too much walking) and they had a lot more freedom to climb and explore at Little Petra. The buildings may not have been quite as ornate and impressive as the Treasury or the Monastery at Petra but they were still very beautiful and awe-inspiring with a similar shared history.
One of the most memorable aspects of our visit was that despite the amazing history and the intact ruins of both Petra and (more notably) Beidha, there were surprisingly few people visiting. There were not many people exploring Little Petra while we were there, and there was absolutely no one at Beidha. There seemed to us an enormous amount of interesting historical sites in Jordan that haven’t yet been discovered by the rest of the world. They are off the beaten track but so beautiful and awe-inspiring that it puzzled us how they could be so untraveled. We feel so lucky to be able to have had such a wonderful visit and highly recommend it to others.
My one piece of advice about Petra and Little Petra is not to rush your visit. There is so much to explore off the main tourist track that you should add a couple of days onto any suggested itinerary. I wish we had stayed for longer than we did. I am really glad that we did not do this as part of a package tour and if you are comfortable traveling this way, we highly recommend it. We saw many large tour groups along the way but that would just not work for us. Everyone has their own interests, and especially with kids it was nice to have the option to spend longer at one place or another, take interesting looking trails that caught our eye, and basically follow our own path.