East of Amman, where the city fades into an endless steppe of black basalt and empty horizons, some strange and fascinating buildings survive: the 'desert castles'. They aren't Crusader or medieval fortresses. They're something more surprising: leisure palaces, hunting lodges, bathhouses and caravanserais that the Umayyad caliphs, the first great dynasty of Islam, built more than thirteen hundred years ago in the middle of nowhere. They came here to escape the cities, hunt, celebrate and strengthen their hold over the desert tribes. Touring them is a journey back to the very beginnings of Islamic civilisation.
The classic circuit, a day trip from Amman, links three unmissable sites. Qusayr Amra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a small bathhouse whose walls and domes keep some astonishing Umayyad frescoes: hunting scenes, bathing scenes, portraits and trades. On the ceiling of the caldarium is one of the oldest surviving maps of the sky, with the zodiac and the constellations. Qasr Kharana is a puzzling square building that looks like a fortress and was probably a meeting place or rest stop. And Qasr Azraq, a black basalt fort beside an oasis, was Lawrence of Arabia's winter headquarters during the Great Arab Revolt.
This guide helps you plan the route: how to do the circuit in a day from Amman, in what order, what admission costs (with the combined ticket and the Jordan Pass), what to see at each castle, and how to add the Azraq oasis and wetland reserve. We also tell the story of the Umayyads and of these unique buildings, which are much more than 'castles'. They're windows onto the art, daily life and power of the first caliphs of Islam, right in the Jordanian desert.
Most of the desert castles are the work of the Umayyad caliphs, the dynasty that ruled the vast Islamic empire from its capital in Damascus between 661 and 750. Many of these princes came from Arab desert tribes and kept a taste for life on the steppe. That's why they built these leisure palaces, hunting lodges, bathhouses and fortified farms far from the cities. There they hunted, relaxed, received tribal chiefs and asserted their authority over the desert routes and the people who lived there. The most famous, Qusayr Amra, was built in the early 8th century (it's attributed to the prince and later caliph Walid). Its frescoes are unique in the history of early Islamic art, because they date from before the ban on depicting human figures took hold. Others, like Qasr Kharana, look like fortresses but were probably caravanserais or meeting places. Qasr Azraq, an old Roman and Byzantine black basalt fort that the Umayyads reused, entered modern history as Lawrence of Arabia's headquarters in 1917-18. After the fall of the Umayyads, many of these buildings were abandoned. Their full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The eastern steppe of the Umayyad palaces: the frescoes of Qusayr Amra, the compact fortress of Kharana and the black basalt castle of Azraq, Lawrence's headquarters.
Read the history of The desert castles (the east) →They depart from Aman, 66 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand the desert castles, you have to go back to the very origins of Islamic civilisation. After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, Islam spread at astonishing speed, and in 661 the first hereditary dynasty of caliphs was established: the Umayyads, who would rule a vast empire — from Spain to Central Asia — for almost a century, until 750, with their capital in Damascus, in neighbouring Syria. It was under the Umayyads that Islam went from being the faith of the Arab tribes to becoming the creed of a world state, with its own administration, currency, art and architecture.
The Umayyad caliphs came largely from the Arab aristocracy, and many kept a strong bond with the desert world their ancestors came from. Unlike later, more urban dynasties, the Umayyad princes liked to leave the cities from time to time and return to the steppe: to hunt, to breed horses, to breathe the desert air and, above all, to keep in touch and maintain alliances with the Bedouin tribes, whose loyalty was key to the caliphate's power.
From this double character — imperial and yet tied to the desert — the so-called 'desert castles' were born. On the steppes east of Damascus and Amman, in lands of present-day Jordan, Syria and Palestine, the Umayyads built a network of leisure residences, hunting lodges, baths, farms and caravanserais. They were not frontier fortresses but places of pleasure, business and politics, where the court would move temporarily and where Umayyad art, heir to the Greco-Roman and Byzantine world, flourished freely. The buildings we visit today in the Jordanian desert are the magnificent remains of that world.
The name 'desert castles' is, to a large extent, misleading. The Arabic word qasr (plural qusur), which appears in many of their names, can mean 'palace', 'mansion' or 'fort', hence the translation 'castle'. But most of these buildings were not defensive military fortresses; they were something far more refined and varied: leisure residences, hunting lodges, bath complexes, farms with sophisticated water-harvesting systems, and inns or caravanserais for caravans and for meetings with the tribes.
Life in these places mixed pleasure and politics. The Umayyad princes came to hunt on the steppes, which were then far richer in wildlife than today; to enjoy banquets, music and baths; to oversee their farming and livestock estates in the desert, which relied on an ingenious use of water; and to receive Bedouin chiefs, seal alliances and assert their authority. They were at once luxury country houses and tools for governing a territory and a population that were hard to control.
The art that decorated these buildings reflects that open mindset, heir to Antiquity. The Umayyads, newly in charge of lands that had been Roman and Byzantine, adopted and adapted their techniques: Roman-style baths, mosaics, frescoes, stucco work and decorative motifs blending the classical, the Persian and the new. In this early Islamic art, human and animal figures were still depicted quite naturally, something that would change in later centuries. That is why the desert castles are a unique window onto a founding and surprisingly cosmopolitan moment in Islamic culture.
If a single building sums up the value of the desert castles, it is Qusayr Amra. Built in the early 8th century — around 723 to 743, in the time of the prince and later caliph Walid — this modest bathhouse attached to a hunting residence was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985, and rightly so: its walls, vaults and domes preserve one of the most important and oldest groups of mural paintings in all of Islamic art. At a time when Islam had not yet developed the reluctance to depict the human figure that would mark its later art, the artists of Amra covered the interior with scenes full of life.
The frescoes of Qusayr Amra are an astonishing catalogue of the Umayyad world: hunters chasing wild asses, bathing scenes, women, musicians and dancers, craftsmen at work (thought to illustrate the construction of the building itself), animals of every kind, and the famous 'six kings' panel, which shows six rulers of the world who had been defeated by or were rivals of Islam (among them the Byzantine emperor and the Visigothic king of Hispania), as a symbol of the caliphate's universal power. It is a direct window onto the life, tastes and outlook of the world of the first Muslim rulers.
The jewel in the crown is in the dome of the caldarium, the hot bath room: a fresco depicting the night sky with the zodiac and the constellations, with dozens of identifiable star figures. It is one of the oldest surviving representations of the map of the heavens on a domed surface, probably copied from an ancient astronomical manuscript. That a small bathhouse in the middle of the Jordanian desert holds such a treasure — early Islamic figurative art and one of the first 'planetariums' in history — is what makes Qusayr Amra an absolutely exceptional place.
Not all the desert castles are Umayyad or pleasure palaces. Qasr Azraq, in the great oasis of the same name, is a true fortress, and its history spans almost two thousand years. Built from huge blocks of black basalt — the volcanic stone that dominates the eastern desert — its origins are Roman: in the first centuries AD, Rome built a fort here to control the desert routes and, above all, the water of the oasis, a vital resource in such an arid setting. The Byzantines, the Umayyads and, most notably, the Ayyubids in the 13th century remodelled and enlarged it, giving it the appearance it still has today, with its massive doors made of basalt slabs that turn on stone hinges.
But what made Qasr Azraq world-famous was an episode from the 20th century. During the First World War, as part of the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire (1916-1918), the fort became, in the winter of 1917-1918, the headquarters of T. E. Lawrence — the legendary 'Lawrence of Arabia' — and of Prince Faisal's Arab forces. From here, in the cold weeks of the desert winter, part of the campaign was prepared that would end with Arab troops entering Damascus and the end of Ottoman rule in the region.
Lawrence recorded that stay in his famous autobiographical book 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom', and visitors are still shown the room above the main gate that, according to tradition, he occupied that winter. Walking through the black basalt halls of Qasr Azraq is therefore a double journey: on the one hand, to Roman Antiquity and the medieval Islamic world; on the other, to one of the most novel-like chapters of the modern history of the Middle East, that of the Arab Revolt and the birth of the region's present-day states.
The fate of the desert castles was bound up with that of the dynasty that created them. When the Umayyads were overthrown in 750 by the Abbasid dynasty, which moved the centre of Islamic power to Baghdad, in present-day Iraq, the Syrian-Jordanian desert lost its political importance. The court no longer came to hunt or to deal with the tribes, and many of these palaces and lodges were abandoned. Some were left unfinished; others fell into ruin little by little, battered by earthquakes, wind and neglect, and stood as enigmatic silhouettes on the empty steppe for more than a thousand years.
That abandonment, paradoxically, helped preserve them: since they were neither reused nor built over, buildings like Qusayr Amra or Qasr Kharana kept much of their original structure and, in Amra's case, its fragile frescoes. For centuries they were known mainly to the local Bedouin, until, between the late 19th and the 20th century, European explorers, travellers and archaeologists 'rediscovered' them for the academic world, studied their paintings and inscriptions and began to appreciate their enormous importance for the history of early Islamic art.
Today, the desert castles are well-cared-for heritage and one of the most unusual day trips in Jordan. Qusayr Amra is a World Heritage Site; the main sites are signposted, restored and open to visitors, and they can be covered on a day circuit from Amman that combines Umayyad art, the story of Lawrence of Arabia and the experience of crossing the eastern desert. Alongside them, the Azraq oasis and its wetland reserve add a natural dimension. For travellers looking for a different Jordan, beyond Petra and Wadi Rum, these buildings offer something unique: a glimpse of the origins of Islamic civilisation in the immense silence of the steppe, where the first caliphs came to escape the world.
