Discover beautiful Petra from the comfort of your home with Google Street View.
Who hasn’t dreamt of the magnificent city of Petra? Its fantastic ruins are still considered to be one of the 7 Wonders of the World, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Over 2,000 years old, the ruins of Petra in Jordan have always fascinated tourists. Today, although far away, it’s still possible to visit this sumptuous site from the comfort of your own home.
Secret Petra
From the very first glance, Petra in Jordan offers a landscape that is immediately imprinted on everyone’s memory. It raises questions, fascination and hypotheses: how could such a prosperous city, with up to 25,000 inhabitants and an important market for eight centuries, disappear overnight, only to reappear at the beginning of the 19th century thanks to Swiss exploration?
Located in the valley of Mount Edom, Petra was a crossroads for caravans between Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Here, luxury goods, spices, silk, Red Sea pearls and Arabian incense were traded.
Today, of course, none of this remains, but the city has lost none of its superb majesty.
A titanic project
The virtual tour of the ruins of Petra has now been added to the catalog of sites photographed and mapped in three dimensions by Google Street View, the Google application. Following in the footsteps of the Angkor temples, the Great Barrier Reef and the Burj Khalifa tower, it’s now Petra’s turn to benefit from a technological showcase accessible to all.
Each shot was taken by a person on foot, holding the famous « trekker », a backpack topped by a blue ball equipped with lenses for 360° photography of the landscape. It took between 4 and 5 days of intense exploration to film and map the treasures hidden in the secret city of Petra.
Now, thanks to Google and its virtual tour of Petra, you can discover a metropolis built over 2,000 years ago by the Nabataeans, the same city featured in such memorable films as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Return of the Mummy and Lawrence of Arabia.