On the outskirts of Amman, the capital of Jordan, a strange vehicle is parked. White cabin, triangular and trapezoidal windows, six thick wheels with gold rims, batteries in the back, and the NASA logo on both doors next to the United States flag... Protected behind thick glass walls, it is one of the star vehicles of the Royal Automobile Museum. This is the rover that Matt Damon drove in Ridley Scott's film Mars, a donation from the producers in gratitude for the country's hospitality during filming in the Wadi Rum desert, in the south of the country.
With its reddish sands and granite and sandstone mountains, it only took the digital addition of a few craters to turn Wadi Rum into the ideal setting for the film. It was not the first time that it was used to recreate our neighboring planet. Before that came the filming of The Last Days on Mars, Mission to Mars and Red Planet. But this desert is also among the locations of great science fiction films such as Dune (parts 1 and 2), the Star Wars saga (The Rise of Skywalker and Rogue One) or Prometheus.
And despite its modest size – 720 km2, the equivalent of the Catalan region of La Segarra –, Wadi Rum is considered the most beautiful desert on Earth. Perhaps it is because of its changing colors: with its shades of copper, rust and amber, the scarlet of the sunset, the mauve that stains the sands at dusk... Perhaps because of the richness of its landscapes: canyons that make their way between the dunes, cliffs, gorges and stone bridges.
Also known as the Valley of the Moon, it has been inhabited since prehistoric times. Testimony of this are some funerary mounds and petroglyphs that show hunting scenes. Most of the rock inscriptions, however, are much more recent. Some belong to the Nabatean civilization, the people who built the mythical city of Petra.
A few thousand Bedouins still inhabit Wadi Rum with their camel herds. Their biggest source of income has become tourists, to whom they offer a variety of activities: from 4x4 tours to climbing, including sandboarding (descending dunes on surf-type boards).
This desert also hosted the filming of David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia. In fact, the soldier and writer Thomas Edward Lawrence used Wadi Rum as a base of operations in support of the Arab rebellion, the movement that in the middle of the First World War – between 1916 and 1918 – sought to free the territories between present-day Yemen from the domination of the Ottoman Empire. and Syria.
The film is based on his book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which ultimately gave its name to one of the mountain formations in the desert. The visit to this point is part of the regular off-road circuits. The routes usually also pass through a spring next to which Lawrence of Arabia supposedly camped. The fact is that the romanticism that surrounds the character in the West – not shared among the Arab world, by the way – has become a conveniently exploited tourist attraction.
Another obligatory stop is the Hijaz ghost train station. This railway line, which under the Ottoman Empire managed to briefly connect Damascus with the holy city of Medina, was one of the main targets (as it appears in the film) of Lawrence of Arabia's sabotage. Visitors can ride a steam locomotive and look inside one of the old wooden carriages. That train to nowhere continues to transport its visitors to the recent past of the Middle East.
