A small terraced village above Al Hamra, overlooked by most visitors, where wheat and garlic still grow on stone terraces cut into the mountainside.
Wukan sits a short, rough drive above Al Hamra, close enough to Misfat Al Abriyeen that the two villages share a mountain and, on a clear day, a sightline. It gets a fraction of the visitors. I’d found it mentioned only in passing, in a hiking forum thread from someone who’d done the connecting trail between the two villages, and went in with almost no expectations. That turned out to be the ideal way to arrive.
Terraces Growing Something Other Than Roses
Where Jebel Akhdar’s terraces are dedicated almost entirely to Damask roses and Misfat’s to date palms and bananas, Wukan’s slopes are given over to wheat and garlic, along with smaller plots of onions and alfalfa, watered by a falaj system running in tighter, steeper channels than the ones I’d seen lower down. The terrace walls here are older and rougher looking, dry stone stacked without mortar, holding soil that farmers still carry up by hand in places too narrow for a mule. I watched a man in his sixties doing exactly that, a woven basket over one shoulder, moving up a set of stone steps with an ease that made my own careful footing look faintly ridiculous by comparison.
The Village Itself
Wukan’s houses climb the slope in loose clusters rather than the tightly packed stack I’d seen in Misfat, giving the village a more open, breathable feel — wider gaps between buildings, more visible sky, terraces visible from nearly every angle rather than glimpsed through alleyways. Lia found a spot near the upper terraces with a clear view down the entire village and sat there for twenty minutes just watching light move across the wheat, calling it, with slight exaggeration I didn’t argue with, the best view she’d found in the Al Hajar so far.
The Trail to Misfat
A hiking route connects Wukan to Misfat Al Abriyeen, a few hours on foot along an old trading path that crosses a ridge between the two villages’ terrace systems. We didn’t have the daylight left to attempt it properly, and I’ve filed it away as the reason to come back — a walk that, from what other hikers described, shows both villages’ terraced agriculture from an angle neither reveals on its own.
When to go: October through March for cooler hiking conditions and the wheat at its greenest; garlic and onion harvests happen in the cooler months as well, giving the terraces the most activity to see.