For centuries thousands of pilgrims a year have made the journey to Bethany Beyond The Jordan, a site on the east bank of the Jordan River which Christians believe to be the exact spot where Jesus was baptised. This number could swell to one million visitors a year if a proposed phased six-year estimated $300 million project for a 'tourist city' adjacent to what is a designated UNESCO World Heritage site goes ahead. Among those who gathered at the river bank last week were Jordan's King Abdullah and Lebanon's Maronite Patriarch Bechara Boutros Al-Rai, who joined architects, museum curators and investors to hear about the proposal from its organisers. People gather at the Qasr el-Yahud site, near Jericho, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as pictured from the Jordan Valley, Jorda...
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travelogues, travel articles and news from Jordan
Archaeologists have discovered a 7,000-year-old stone age site in a remote desert in Jordan, with structures which show humans were rounding up and hunting gazelles much earlier than previously thought. The team of French and Jordanian experts also found over 250 artifacts at the site, including exquisite animal figurines which they believe were used in rituals to invoke supernatural forces for successful hunts. One of the two statues uncovered by archaeologists in the southeastern Jordanian desert is pictured during a news conference in Amman, Jordan February 22, 2022. REUTERS/Muath Freij The objects, which include two stone statues with carvings of human faces, are among some of the oldest artistic pieces ever found in the Middle East. "This is a unique site where large quan...
Read MoreHoping for customers, Ahmad Nassar is dusting and polishing the trinkets and souvenirs in his tourist shop in Madaba, an ancient town in central Jordan known for its early Christian mosaics. The coronavirus pandemic has been a disaster for Jordan's tourism industry and for its economy as a whole, which suffered its worst contraction in decades last year. "I felt despair, there was no income, no work, there was no support for shop owners," Nassar said. Tourists walk along the Siq in the ancient city of Petra, Jordan July 2, 2021. REUTERS/Muath Freij Now foreign tourists are starting to trickle back, and the situation is looking more hopeful, he said. The European Union last week included Jordan among a dozen new epidemiologically safe countries as of July 1, and government e...
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