Downtown (Al-Balad)

A look around

What you’ll be living next to. Swipe through.

1/6

What’s around

Real places inside Downtown— you’d walk to all of these.

• مطعم عفرا

• هاشم

  middle eastern

• مطعم مشاوي في البلد عمان

• Jafra

  regional

• Al Quds

  regional

• Sufra

  regional

• Zorba

  fish

• لا كاليه

  spanish

• El Cairo

  regional

• زجل

  regional

• عزوتي

• ALHOURIAT HOTEL&RESTURANT

Places from OpenStreetMap. A snapshot — check current hours before you go.

Where it sits

The circle is Downtown and roughly a 10-minute walk around it.

How far is everything?

From the middle of this area to the city's headline sights — pick your own on the city page and these become your list.

• Rainbow Street7 min walk547 m
• Mansaf at Sufra7 min walk607 m
• Souk Jara7 min walk607 m
• Wild Jordan Center7 min walk607 m
• Al-Pasha Turkish Bath7 min walk607 m
• Darat al Funun14 min walk1.1 km
• King Abdullah I Mosque22 min walk1.8 km

On your doorstep

What you’re living next to if you stay here.

• 1.The Citadel (Jabal al-Qal'a) — Everyone tells you to go for the Roman temple. Go for the edge of the hill instead — the whole white city drops away below you, and at sunset the call to prayer comes up from about forty mosques at once.
• 2.The Roman Theatre — Six thousand seats cut into the hillside in the middle of a working city. Climb to the very top row — it's steeper than it looks and the acoustics still work.
• 3.Hashem Restaurant — A downtown alley, plastic chairs, open all night, and it has fed everyone in this city including the king. Falafel, hummus, fuul, mint tea. There is no menu and you don't need one.
• 5.Knafeh at Habibah — Find the alley off King Hussein Street with a queue coming out of it. Order knafeh nabulsieh, eat it standing up off a paper plate, burn your mouth. Costs about a pound.
• 7.The Jordan Museum — Small, modern, and holds the Ain Ghazal statues — nine-thousand-year-old plaster figures with enormous eyes, among the oldest human likenesses ever found. Worth it for that room alone.
• 11.The downtown souks — The gold souk, the spice sellers and the vegetable market run into each other around King Talal Street. Go late afternoon when it's busiest — this is the loudest, most alive part of the city.
• 13.King Hussein Mosque & the downtown stairs — Start at the mosque in the valley and climb any of the public staircases that run up the hillsides. They're how people actually get around here, and they open onto views no road does.
• 15.Duke's Diwan — A 1920s house above a shop on King Faisal Street, kept as a free public salon. Ring the bell, climb the stairs, wander through empty period rooms. There's no ticket and no guide and that's the charm.