Dana

The terraces below the village are the oldest thing here. Water from springs on the escarpment has been led onto them for cultivation since antiquity, and the wider area was worked far earlier still: the copper ores of the Faynan valley, which lies at the foot of the reserve, were mined and smelted from the Chalcolithic period onwards and on an industrial scale in the Iron Age, leaving slag heaps and the mining settlement at Khirbat en-Nahas, one of the largest copper mining and smelting sites of the ancient world. Working of the ores went on in the valley into the Mamluk period, and remains of settlements, aqueducts and shafts survive there.

The stone village on the spur took its present form under Ottoman rule, when families of the Ata'ta and other local groups farmed the terraces, kept goats and moved between the highland and the warm lowland with the seasons. It was a settlement of dry-stone houses with beamed roofs, tightly packed for shelter and defence at the canyon's edge.

In the twentieth century most residents left for Al-Qadisiyah on the new highway above, where services, road access and work at the cement and mining operations were, and the old houses fell into ruin. The Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature established the Dana Biosphere Reserve in 1989 and began working with the remaining villagers on tourism, craft production and grazing agreements. Houses were restored from the 1990s as guesthouses, a campsite was opened in the reserve and a lodge built at Feynan, and the village became one of Jordan's best-known walking destinations.

Dana's culture is that of the southern Jordanian highlands: tribal, agricultural and closely tied to seasonal movement. Families here have historically combined terrace farming with goat and sheep herding, taking flocks down into the warmer wadi in winter and back up in summer, and the Bedouin families of the Ata'ta, the native inhabitants of the reserve, maintain the same pattern. Land, water rights and grazing are matters of long-standing family agreement rather than paperwork.

Conservation has become part of local identity. The reserve employs villagers as rangers, guides, drivers and in workshops producing dried fruit, herbs, jewellery and leather, and the argument that protecting the canyon pays better than quarrying or overgrazing it has been tested here longer than almost anywhere in the country. Visitors are treated as part of that economy, with a directness that is friendly but not effusive.

Manners follow the conservative pattern of the highlands. Dress is modest, hospitality is immediate — tea within minutes of arrival, refusal awkward — and gender roles remain fairly traditional, with women's work in the craft workshops a notable change of recent decades. Ramadan reshapes the day in the village, and weddings bring music, drumming and dabke dancing to Al-Qadisiyah. Quiet is part of the place: there is little traffic and, at night, little light.

Only a small permanent population lives in the old village, while many more live in Al-Qadisiyah above it; the reserve covers a very large area with scattered Bedouin encampments and almost no other permanent settlement. Guesthouses, the reserve's staff, craft workshops and guiding provide most of the work in the village itself, and tourism income rises and falls with regional crises in a way everyone here feels directly.

Outside tourism, the local economy rests on herding, terrace crops of olives, figs, pomegranates and grapes, and jobs in Tafilah and at the industrial sites along the highway. Young people commonly leave for Amman or Aqaba for education and work, and the movement from the old houses to the modern town continues. Water supply is intermittent, as in most of Jordan, and households store it in rooftop tanks.

The rhythm is unhurried and set by the light. Flocks move out in the early morning, walkers set off for the descent before the heat, the middle of the day is quiet, and the evening brings people onto terraces and rooftops where the canyon cools. Winter is harder here than most visitors expect: wind, cloud and cold stone, with heating by gas and, in some houses, wood.

Eating in Dana is home cooking served to guests rather than restaurant cooking. Maqluba — rice, chicken or lamb and fried aubergine and cauliflower cooked in one pot and turned out upside down — is the usual centrepiece, alongside galayet bandora, tomatoes cooked down with olive oil, onion and chilli and scooped up with bread. Lentil soup, hummus, labneh, tabbouleh, olives and pickles fill the table, and flatbread or shrak is used in place of cutlery.

The terraces supply much of the flavour. Olives and olive oil from the valley, figs and grapes dried for the winter, pomegranates in autumn, almonds, and herbs gathered on the escarpment — above all sage, which goes into tea, and za'atar, mixed with sesame and sumac and eaten with oil and bread at breakfast. Goat's milk becomes labneh and jameed, the hard dried yoghurt that is the base of mansaf, the lamb and rice dish served at weddings and for honoured guests.

Sweet black tea is constant, and Arabic coffee with cardamom marks arrivals and farewells. Bedouin cooking in the lower reserve adds bread baked in the embers and meat cooked slowly in a covered pit. Alcohol has no place in village life, and supplies of anything not grown locally come up from Tafilah or along the King's Highway.