Ancient Petra a ghost town as pandemic hits Jordan tourism.

For over two millennia the ancient city of Petra has towered majestically over the Jordanian desert. Today its famed rose-red temples hewn into the rockface lie empty and silent. As the novel coronavirus spread around the world, Jordanian authorities imposed a lockdown, and the last tourists left on March 16, a day before the Hashemite kingdom closed its borders.

'It's the first time I've seen this place so empty. Usually there are thousands of tourists,' said Nayef Hilalat, 42, who has worked as a guardian at the ancient archaeological site for a decade.

'Every year at this time the place would be buzzing with people,' he lamented, wearing a khaki cap bearing the Jordanian flag. 'Today all we can hear is the birds singing.'

Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt reach understanding on Nile dam

One of the seven wonders of the world, and classified as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1985, Petra was once the capital of the nomadic Nabataean Arab peoples and dates back to at least 200 years BC.

With the passage of time, it has become a beacon for tourism in the country and the region.

Its spectacular Al-Khazneh, or Treasury, with its stunning sandstone facade, is one of Petra's most famous attractions, and was a location for Steven Spielberg's 1989 movie 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade'. But now, the steep winding Siq path -- a gorge over a kilometre long that leads into Al-Khazneh -- is deserted.

Gone are the tourists normally thronging the pathway on foot, or riding on donkeys or in horse-drawn carriages.

Life is in limbo. Tables at the site's cafes forlornly gather dust or are littered with forgotten plastic cups, while items like T-shirts in the souvenir shops fade in the desert sun. The vast site, lying in a deep valley between the Red Sea, in the south, and the Dead Sea, to the north, is a ghost town. Around 200 tour guides, along with 1,500 horse and donkey owners, are out of work.

It's 'a catastrophe', said 55-year-old Naim Nawafleh, who has been a guide here for about 30 years.

Jordan welcomes some five million visitors a year, and tourism accounts for 14 percent of the country's GDP, employing about 100,000 people. A father of six, Nawafleh used to earn some $70 a day.

'In the past, the number of visitors varied according to the upheavals in the region. But today, there are no tourists at all. It's never happened before,' he said. Jordan was already in a precarious situation before the pandemic, with unemployment at 19.3 percent in the first...