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World Heritage

Return to the Ancestral Cave

A winding mountain gorge, immense temples and edifices carved into its narrow rock walls; a vast and complex water collection and storage system to wring an artificial oasis out of the desert: Petra can seem more like a fantasy than a real place. But this Jordanian valley, once the center of a desert empire, remained until the 1980s an inhabited town, its inhabitants living in homes carved into the rock among the two thousand year-old temples. And now they are coming back.

The people of Um Sayhun village in the Petra region have plenty of the same grievances of other underdeveloped villages in Jordan