The real situation at Petra
Petra receives between 500,000 and 1 million visitors per year, depending on the year and how you count day-trip arrivals versus independent visitors. Concentrated by the logic of tour group scheduling into a window from roughly 9am to 2pm, that volume at the Treasury means: horse-drawn carriages, selfie poles, competing audio guides, and the particular social pressure of a crowd moving in one direction.
The Treasury is still extraordinary. But you can have it at 7am on a Wednesday morning in November with perhaps thirty other people in the entire canyon, and that is a different thing.
Here is every technique that has actually worked for us.
Arrive at 6am on the dot
The gates open at 6am. The tour groups — which are brought from Amman on a three-hour bus journey and Aqaba on a two-hour bus journey — do not arrive before 9am. This gives you a window.
Walking the Siq at 6am is, in terms of light, not optimal: the sun hasn’t reached the canyon floor yet and the Treasury is in shadow for the first hour. But the experience of the Siq with near-silence — just the sound of your footsteps on the stone — is worth the compromise on photography. By 7:30am, the sun begins to reach the upper portions of the Treasury facade. By 8:00-8:30am, depending on season, you have good light on the carving.
By 9am, the first tour groups begin arriving and the experience shifts fundamentally.
Practical note: Hotels in Wadi Musa are often 500-800 meters from the Petra gate. You can walk. The road is lit. Bring a headlamp anyway; the approach road has uneven sections.
Go on a weekday
Friday is Jordan’s day off and many domestic visitors combine a Petra trip with a Friday lunch outing. Weekend crowds (Friday-Saturday in Jordan) are noticeably heavier than weekday crowds. If your schedule has flexibility, aim for Sunday-Thursday.
Tuesday and Wednesday are consistently the quietest days of the week in our experience across multiple visits. There’s no particularly logical explanation for why Tuesday should be less crowded than Monday, but it reliably is.
The back door: entering from Little Petra
This is the least-known genuinely effective strategy for Petra crowd avoidance, and it requires more planning than a simple early arrival.
Little Petra (Al-Beidha) is a smaller Nabataean site about 8 km north of Petra — a miniature version of the city with carved facades, a painted triclinium, and water channels, largely ignored by the tour bus itineraries. It receives perhaps 5% of Petra’s daily visitors. Admission is free (as of 2022; verify this at the time of your visit).
From Little Petra, a marked hiking trail called the Sabra Trail leads south through the Nabataean countryside, past ancient agricultural terraces and cisterns, and delivers you into Petra from the north — near the Monastery (Ad Deir), the site’s second major monument. The hike takes about 2-3 hours and requires moderate fitness; it’s exposed and has no shade, so do it in the cool of morning.
The result: you arrive at the Monastery — which already gets significantly less traffic than the Treasury — from the least-used direction, with no tour groups in sight, having walked through terrain that the vast majority of Petra visitors never see.
Important: You still need to purchase a valid Petra entry ticket (or use your Jordan Pass). The back door is a route in, not a bypass of the entry system. Some sources online claim otherwise; they are wrong, and attempting entry without a valid ticket at any point in the site will result in being escorted back out.
Our full guide to this route is at /guides/petra-back-door/.
Petra by Night: go early in the evening
Petra by Night runs three times per week — Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday — starting at 8:30pm. The Siq is lit by candles; the Treasury is illuminated with colored lights; Bedouin music plays from a small stage area. The effect is genuinely beautiful when it works.
The crowd situation varies significantly depending on tour operator scheduling. The first visitors tend to arrive shortly after 8:30pm; the latest arrivals trickle in past 9:15pm. The production runs until about 10:30pm.
If you arrive exactly at 8:30pm (as advertised), you’ll be among the first people into the Siq and will have the best position for the Treasury reveal. If you arrive at 9pm, you’re walking through an arriving crowd. Punctuality matters.
Admission is approximately 17 JOD separately from the daytime entry. It is included in the Jordan Pass for holders with multi-day Petra access.
Petra by Night: show tickets and hotel pick-upOff-season: December to February
This is the single most effective crowd-avoidance strategy, with the highest price in terms of travel flexibility.
December through February is Jordan’s low tourist season. Petra in December receives a fraction of its peak-season visitors — some days in early January see fewer than 500 visitors total, compared to 5,000+ in October. The Treasury in that crowd context is, as described at the start, a completely different experience.
The weather trade-off: winter temperatures in Petra are 5-15°C during the day, sometimes dropping below freezing at night. Rain is possible. Snow is rare but not unknown — the Petra highlands see light snow roughly every two or three years. If you’re from a northern climate, this is not challenging; if you expect the heat of the Middle East, recalibrate.
The accommodation benefit: hotels in Wadi Musa often discount by 30-50% from December through February. The same room that costs 80 JOD in October might be 45-50 JOD in January.
December has the added advantage of overlapping with the Christmas pilgrimage season, which brings visitors to Jordan’s biblical sites — Bethany, Madaba, Mount Nebo — but doesn’t particularly increase Petra traffic.
What the crowds are actually like by time and month
Based on multiple visits across different seasons:
| Month | Typical Treasury crowd at 9am | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| October | Heavy | Peak season, tour groups concentrated |
| November | Moderate | Drops significantly mid-November |
| December | Light | Low season begins |
| January | Very light | Quietest month |
| February | Light | Beginning of recovery |
| March | Moderate-heavy | Spring influx begins early-mid March |
| April | Heavy | Peak. Easter pilgrimages add to volume |
| May | Very heavy | Often the busiest month of year |
| June-August | Moderate | Heat deters European groups; some Middle Eastern domestic tourism |
| September | Heavy | Recovery season, European summer holidays ending |
The high-traffic areas vs the quiet areas
Even at the busiest times, Petra’s back-country areas receive minimal visitors. The colonnaded street crowds thin out past the Great Temple. The High Place of Sacrifice — 800 steps, steep — filters out visitors who aren’t willing to climb. The Monastery sees perhaps 25% of the visitors that the Treasury sees on any given day.
The Petra back-country, accessible on foot from the Monastery with a guide, has sections that see fewer than ten visitors per week. If your goal is solitude rather than monument photography, it’s available — but it requires hiking fitness and preferably a licensed guide, as the terrain is genuinely remote.
The bottom line
You don’t have to choose between Petra and crowds. With an early start, a weekday visit, or better yet an off-season trip, you can have something approaching the experience that the photographs on the site’s official materials suggest — which is to say, an extraordinary ancient city without competition for the view.
Petra: private 3-hour guided tour with hotel pickupFor full logistics: /destinations/petra/. For the back-door approach guide: /guides/petra-back-door/. For the trek that brings you in through the back door after four days of hiking through Jordan’s most beautiful landscape: /guides/dana-to-petra-trek/.
The Treasury, empty, at 6:45am on a November Tuesday, with the sun just reaching the top of the carved facade: it’s still one of the best things we’ve seen anywhere.