The People Who Were Moved Out of Petra

The tombs above the Petra basin have soot on their ceilings. Not from torches carried by archaeologists, and not from the Nabataeans who cut them out of the sandstone two thousand years ago. From cooking fires, lit inside them for generations by families who lived in the tombs until 1985, when they were moved out.

The Bdoul — B'doul, Bedul, the spelling varies — are a tribe of a few thousand people whose claim to Petra runs back at least several centuries and, by their own account, considerably further. When UNESCO inscribed the site on the World Heritage list in 1985, part of what came with it was the relocation of the people living inside it to a purpose-built settlement on the ridge above, called Umm Sayhoun.

What UNESCO listing means for people

The logic was not arbitrary. Cooking fires inside rock-cut tombs damage them; so does living in them. Goats in a Nabataean city are hard on the archaeology. The management plan called for the basin to be cleared of permanent residence, and a government housing scheme built concrete block housing a couple of kilometres up the hill, with a school and a clinic.

What the plan did not fully account for is what happens to a tribe whose entire economic and social geography is the site they no longer live in. The Bdoul kept the right to work in Petra — the horses, the camels, the donkeys, the stalls, the guiding — and lost the right to be there after hours. They became commuters into their own valley.

Umm Sayhoun was built for around 150 families and now holds several times that. It has grown without a corresponding expansion of services, and the tribe's position within the wider Jordanian economy has not improved in line with Petra's visitor numbers, which went from a few tens of thousands a year in the 1980s to over a million before 2020.

The Bdoul kept the right to work in Petra and lost the right to live there. They became commuters into their own valley.

The economics of a donkey

Walk into Petra and you are offered transport constantly — horse to the Siq entrance, horse-drawn carriage through it, camel at the Treasury, donkey up the 800 steps to the Monastery. The persistence wears visitors down and generates a steady stream of complaints, some of them about animal welfare and some of them simply about being asked.

The welfare concerns are legitimate and have been documented repeatedly. Heat, load, hoof condition and the number of trips per day are all real problems, and there are now veterinary clinics operating inside the site and a licensing regime that has improved things without solving them. What is less often stated is why the pressure to sell a ride is so relentless. For a family in Umm Sayhoun, the animals are the asset, the season is short, and the concession rights are one of the few pieces of the Petra economy the tribe actually holds. The hotels in Wadi Musa, the tour operators, the ticketing — those are mostly owned elsewhere.

When visitor numbers collapsed in 2020, this became visible very fast. Families with no other income and animals that still had to be fed sold horses, slaughtered some, and in a number of cases could not feed the rest. Emergency feed programmes run by international welfare charities kept a substantial part of the Petra animal population alive through two seasons.

Living with the archaeology

There is a version of this story in which the Bdoul are simply victims of a heritage bureaucracy, and it is too simple. Some of the tribe supported the move; the houses in Umm Sayhoun have water and electricity, which the caves did not. The site is in better condition than it would have been. And the Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority, established in 2009, is a genuine attempt to route more of the revenue locally rather than to Amman.

There is also a version in which the tribe is a colourful part of the visitor experience, which is worse. The best-known book to come out of Petra is Married to a Bedouin, by a New Zealand nurse who married into the tribe and lived in a cave through the 1980s, and it is sold at every stall on the site. It is a good book. It has also become the frame through which a great many visitors understand people who are living with the practical consequences of a policy decision made forty years ago.

What to do about it as a visitor

Buy from the stalls inside the site rather than the shops in Wadi Musa; the ones in the basin are almost all Bdoul-run and the ones in town largely are not. Say no clearly to a ride you do not want, once, and then stop engaging — the negotiation continues as long as you participate in it. If you do want a ride, use the animals on the flat, avoid the Monastery steps in the middle of the day, and look at the animal before you agree.

Take the second day. The overwhelming majority of visitors see the Siq and the Treasury and leave by lunchtime on a single ticket, which concentrates the entire economic and physical pressure of a million people onto about 5% of a 264-square-kilometre site. The second-day ticket is much cheaper, the Monastery and the High Place are largely empty, and the money spread over two days is spread over more households.

And walk in from Little Petra through the back route, or over the ridge from Dana if there is time. You arrive at the Monastery from above rather than at the Treasury from below, the guides on that route are almost entirely local, and it is the only way to see the scale of what the Bdoul were moved out of.