If Petra is Jordan's stone jewel and Wadi Rum its sand desert, Dana is its green heart: the country's largest nature reserve, a place where travellers change pace, put away the monument camera and lace up their boots to walk. From the stone village perched on the edge of an immense canyon, the reserve spills down the mountain, from cool summits covered in juniper to the scorching desert of Wadi Araba, crossing four bioclimatic zones and an astonishing biodiversity in just a few kilometres of descent.
Dana is the flagship of ecotourism in Jordan, a pioneering project of the RSCN (the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature) that achieved something difficult: protecting nature while giving the local community a future. The old Ottoman village of Dana, half abandoned, was reborn thanks to responsible tourism, and today its restored stone houses welcome travellers who come to walk, watch birds and ibex, sleep under the stars and discover a side of Jordan that doesn't make the postcards but wins over anyone who seeks it out.
This guide helps you plan your visit to Dana: which trails to do (from a short stroll through the canyon to the great trek to Feynan), how much admission and accommodation cost, where to sleep (from the guesthouse with views to the legendary candlelit ecolodge), when to go and how to combine it with Petra along the King's Highway. Dana is a place to take your time: to walk slowly, listen to the silence of the mountains, watch the sunset colour the canyon and understand why many travellers remember it as the most peaceful and authentic moment of their whole trip to Jordan.
Dana village is an old farming village of Ottoman origin, with stone houses perched on the edge of a great canyon, inhabited for centuries by communities that farmed terraced gardens and raised livestock using the mountain springs. The area also has a much older past: in the lowlands of the reserve, towards Feynan, lie some of the copper mines worked for thousands of years, as far back as the Bronze Age, among the oldest in the world. In the mid-20th century, with modernisation and rural exodus, Dana village was almost abandoned. Its revival came in 1989-1993, when the RSCN (Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature) created the Dana Biosphere Reserve and launched a pioneering ecotourism model that restored the village, protected nature and gave work and a future to the local community. Today Dana is Jordan's largest reserve and an international benchmark for conservation and responsible tourism. Its full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The monumental south: Nabataean Petra carved into the rock, the Wadi Rum desert, the country's only port at Aqaba and the castles of the old King's Highway.
Read the history of The south: Petra, Wadi Rum and the King's Highway →They depart from Petra, 42 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Dana's story begins long before its stone village: it begins underground, in the copper veins that run through the reserve's lowlands, around Feynan and the Wadi Araba. There, thousands of years ago, people discovered and exploited one of the resources that would change civilisation: copper. The Feynan mines are one of the oldest and largest copper mining and smelting complexes in the world, with documented activity from the Neolithic and, above all, during the Bronze and Iron Ages, between four and six thousand years ago.
For millennia, generation after generation dug tunnels here, extracted the ore and smelted it in furnaces, leaving a landscape marked by mountains of slag (the black waste from smelting) and by the remains of settlements, workshops and water systems. Some researchers have linked this region to ancient kingdoms and stories of the area, and even to biblical episodes, given its huge importance as a source of metal in a world that depended on bronze, and later iron, for its tools and weapons.
Mining continued in Roman and Byzantine times, when, according to the sources, the Feynan mines were also worked by prisoners and convicts in extremely harsh conditions. This thousands-of-years-old mining past gives Dana a historical depth that surprises visitors who come expecting only nature: beneath its spectacular landscapes lies one of the oldest chapters in the history of human technology. Today you can visit these mines on guided walks from the Feynan ecolodge, a journey back to the origins of metalworking.
In the reserve's highlands, perched on the edge of a great canyon, the village of Dana is another chapter in the area's story: that of the farming communities who lived in these mountains for centuries. The village, with its distinctive stone houses, took its present shape mainly in the Ottoman period (18th and 19th centuries), although people settled here much earlier, drawn by the springs and the relatively fertile slopes.
Dana's people lived from a clever and sustainable form of mountain farming: they grew vegetable gardens and fruit trees on terraces stepped down the canyon slopes, making the most of every drop of spring water through channels, and they raised goats and sheep. It was a hard life but one adapted to its surroundings, in balance with a nature rich in biodiversity but demanding. For generations, Dana's families knew every path, every spring and every corner of these mountains, knowledge that partly survives today thanks to ecotourism.
That traditional way of life went into crisis in the 20th century. Modernisation, the lack of economic opportunities, the pull of the cities and changes in farming caused a rural exodus that gradually emptied the village. In the mid and late 20th century, many families moved to nearby towns and cities in search of work, and Dana became more and more deserted, its stone houses slowly falling into ruin. The beautiful canyon village seemed doomed to disappear, like so many rural villages in the country. But its story was about to take an unexpected turn.
The turning point came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, thanks to the RSCN, the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature of Jordan, a pioneering environmental organisation in the country. Aware of the area's extraordinary natural value (its geology, its biodiversity, its four bioclimatic zones in a single place) and of the risk of losing both the nature and the village, the RSCN pushed for the creation of the Dana Biosphere Reserve, established in 1989 and developed over the following years until it became Jordan's largest nature reserve.
What made the Dana project special was not just protecting nature, but doing it in a way that benefited the local community instead of pushing it out. The RSCN bet on a pioneering model of ecotourism and community development: it restored the village houses, created places to stay (the Dana Guesthouse), opened trails, trained local guides and rangers, and launched economic projects for the residents, such as craft workshops (silver jewellery, pottery), jam and herb production, and tourism jobs. The idea was that nature conservation would also be the engine of a new life for the people of Dana.
The model worked and became an international benchmark for how responsible tourism can fund conservation and give rural communities a future. Dana won ecotourism awards and inspired other RSCN reserves in Jordan. The dying village came back to life: its stone houses filled up again, now with travellers from all over the world who come to walk, watch wildlife and discover a different way of travelling around the country. It was a true rescue, of nature and community at the same time.
The underlying reason Dana is such a treasure is its extraordinary biodiversity, the result of its unique geography. The reserve stretches from the highlands, more than 1,500 metres up, down to the floor of the Wadi Araba desert, close to sea level, dropping a huge distance over a relatively short stretch. That descent crosses four different bioclimatic zones (Mediterranean mountain, Irano-Turanian, Saharan and Sudanian), so a single reserve brings together environments that elsewhere would be thousands of kilometres apart.
That variety of habitats translates into exceptional biological richness. Dana is home to hundreds of plant species, many of them rare or endemic, from the juniper and cypress woodlands of the heights to the desert vegetation of the lowlands. Its wildlife includes iconic mammals such as the Nubian ibex, the wolf, the fox, the caracal and even, in theory, elusive species like the striped hyena; and a very rich birdlife, with many breeding and migratory species, making Dana one of the best places in Jordan for birdwatching, including birds of prey. There are also reptiles and plant life adapted to each altitude band.
This diversity is exactly what the RSCN works to protect, and what visitors come to discover on the trails, often guided by local rangers who know where and when to spot wildlife. Walking from the cool summits to the scorching desert on the great Wadi Dana trail literally means crossing several natural worlds in a few hours. That sense of diversity and untouched nature is the heart of the Dana experience and what sets it apart from anywhere else in Jordan.
Today's Dana is Jordan's largest nature reserve and one of the symbols of responsible tourism in the Middle East. The restored village, with its guesthouses overlooking the canyon, welcomes travellers from all over the world who are looking for something different from the big monuments: nature, hiking, silence, starry skies and genuine contact with local life. The reserve's trails, from the short walk along the canyon to the great trek down to Feynan, let you experience its amazing variety of landscapes, and local cooperatives offer crafts and products that keep the community's economy alive.
In the lowlands, the Feynan Ecolodge has become an international emblem of ecotourism: a lodge without electricity in the rooms, lit by candles and powered by solar energy, run in close partnership with the area's Bedouin communities, who work as guides, cooks and drivers and benefit directly from tourism. Feynan combines nature, archaeology (the ancient copper mines) and Bedouin culture, and regularly appears on lists of the world's best ecolodges. It is living proof that you can offer a memorable travel experience while respecting the environment and the people.
Dana is also part of the Jordan Trail, the long-distance path that crosses the country from north to south, and is one of its most celebrated stages, as well as the starting point for multi-day routes through the mountains all the way to Petra itself. Beyond the figures and the awards, what makes Dana special is a combination that is hard to achieve: protected, splendid nature, a local community that has found a future in looking after it, and a slow, respectful way of travelling. In a country famous for its ancient stones, Dana is a reminder that Jordan is also nature, silence and mountains, and it offers travellers one of its most peaceful and authentic corners.
