Wadi Rum
— — sandstone the colour of slow-burning iron.
Not only on a wall.
“A protected desert of red sandstone and granite in southern Jordan, walked for thousands of years by the Bedouin and crossed in 1917 by T. E. Lawrence on his way north. UNESCO listed the area as a mixed natural and cultural site in 2011. Camps run by the Zalabia tribe operate near the visitor village. The colour shifts hour by hour, deepest just before sunset.
Wadi Rum, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Wadi Rum is a desert valley of roughly 720 square kilometres in southern Jordan's Aqaba Governorate, about 60 kilometres east of the Red Sea port of Aqaba. UNESCO inscribed it as a mixed natural and cultural World Heritage Site in 2011, citing both the eroded sandstone landscape and 25,000 years of human presence recorded in rock inscriptions. The protected area is administered alongside the Zalabia Bedouin community, who run camps and 4x4 routes from the visitor centre near Rum village.
The valley floors sit at roughly 950 metres above sea level; the surrounding sandstone massifs rise another 700 metres above them. Jebel Umm ad Dami, on the southern edge of the protected area, is Jordan's highest summit at 1,854 metres. The Cambrian and Ordovician sandstones weather into mushroom-stemmed pillars and long fluted walls. Granite forms the lower mountain bases. Petroglyphs and Thamudic inscriptions are carried in the rock along several recognised routes through the valley.
The rock holds its colour most fully in the first hour after sunrise and the last hour before sunset, when low light reads the iron in the sandstone and the walls turn the deep orange that gives the desert its English name, the Valley of the Moon. Midday flattens everything to ochre. Night sky over the protected area carries little artificial light, and most camps offer star viewing as part of an overnight stay.