Shobak Castle

I nearly didn’t stop at Shobak. It was a detour off the King’s Highway on the drive between Amman and Petra, the kind of brown road sign you pass a hundred of in southern Jordan, and I had already budgeted my day around getting to Wadi Musa before dark. But a Jordanian friend in Amman had told me, with real insistence, “go to Shobak, it’s Kerak without the crowd,” and that sentence turned out to be exactly true. I parked in an empty lot at the base of a hill, walked up a rough path with nobody else in sight, and had the entire ruined castle to myself for close to an hour on a weekday afternoon.

Baldwin I of Jerusalem built it in 1115 and called it Krak de Montreal, the first Crusader stronghold in the region, meant to control the trade route running from Damascus to Egypt and to keep an eye on Muslim pilgrims heading to Mecca. It changed hands after Saladin’s forces starved out the garrison in 1189 following a siege that lasted, depending on which chronicle you believe, somewhere between eighteen months and two years — the defenders reportedly resorted to eating their horses and then, when that ran out, negotiating surrender in exchange for safe passage. Walking the crumbling walls now, past collapsed towers and Arabic inscriptions carved into stone lintels from its later Ayyubid and Mamluk life as a garrison and administrative post, I kept trying to imagine defending this exposed hilltop through a winter siege with no relief coming. It seemed like a special, specific kind of misery.

The best part, and the reason I ended up staying two hours instead of one, is a spiral staircase cut down through the rock beneath the castle to a hidden spring — 375 steps according to the sign at the top, cut so the garrison could reach water without leaving the walls under siege. A local guide who appeared from nowhere, the way they always do at sites like this, offered to take me down with a flashlight for a few dinars, and we descended into cold, damp dark that smelled like wet limestone, our voices bouncing strangely off walls carved by hand nine hundred years ago for exactly this purpose. Coming back up into the blinding afternoon light, squinting, legs burning, I understood the castle in a way the ruined walls above ground alone hadn’t given me.

When to go: Any time the King’s Highway is open is fine, but go in the morning if you want the staircase to yourself before any tour groups that do stop arrive. Bring your own light for the water tunnel just in case no guide is around — a phone flashlight works, but a proper torch is better on the uneven steps.