From ancient mosaic maps to crumbling Byzantine ruins, discover the best things to do in Madaba, Jordan’s surprising Christian city.
Located some 30 kilometres south-west of Amman, the Jordanian capital, Madaba is one of the Middle East’s most intriguing cities. Better known as the ‘City of Mosaics’ (for its historic Byzantine artworks and mosaic making traditions) Madaba’s Christian heritage and population has somehow survived in an otherwise Muslim-majority nation.
I set out to explore this rare Christian city within the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, stopping off as part of a larger road trip along the ancient King’s Highway (the oldest continuously used road in the world!). Though often overshadowed by Jordan’s more famous archaeological sites such as Petra and Jerash, Madaba’s historical and cultural significance far outweighs its modest footprint on the modern map.
Watch my YouTube Video to see what the city is like to visit, or keep reading to discover the best things to do in Madaba.
Table of Contents
Best things to do in Madaba
Here are the best things to do in Madaba, Jordan:
1. Take a walking tour with Fadi Karadshi
The first thing to do in Madaba is to join a walking tour with energetic local and pilgrim tour guide Fadi Karadshi. A tour with Fadi Karadshih isn’t your average sightseeing circuit—it’s a blend of lived history, personal memory, and theological storytelling. A retired police officer turned biblical guide, Fadi’s knowledge of Madaba is matched only by his passion for sharing it.
“I’m not just a guide,” he insists. “Anyone who comes to my city is a friend.” That’s why he offers free walking tours of his home city, and bespoke sightseeing tours of Madaba and surrounding biblical sights.
Starting from the Greek Orthodox Church of St George, Fadi takes visitors through a two-hour journey that loops through churches, alleyways, underground ruins and active community centres. His narration is a mixture of biblical reference, personal testimony, and folk memory.
He often points out landmarks that go unnoticed in other tours: an Ottoman-era cistern hidden beneath a courtyard, a 6th-century mosaic still embedded in someone’s living room floor, the exact spot Pope John Paul II stood during his visit in 2000.
2. Visit the famed Mosaic Map in the Greek Orthodox Church of St George
Madaba’s most renowned attraction is the 6th-century mosaic map of the Holy Land, located on the floor of the Greek Orthodox Church of St George. Originally part of a much larger work, the map once depicted over 150 towns and villages across the region. Today, around 24 square metres survive, revealing a visual guide to ancient Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jericho, and the Jordan River.
“It was made in the 6th century AD,” explained Fadi on his walking tour of Madaba. “The purpose was to show the geography of the Bible—Old and New Testaments—from Egypt to Palestine.”
The map, rediscovered in 1886 after the resettlement of Christian Bedouins from Karak, became a geopolitical relic. It dates from a time when Byzantine Christianity held cultural dominance in the Levant—an era when art was used not merely for decoration but as an assertion of spiritual authority and territorial understanding.
3. Explore Madaba’s Christian heritage
Madaba’s Christian roots run deep, but they’re entwined with narratives of displacement and negotiation. As Fadi recounted, many of the city’s current Christian families—including his own—descended from groups forced to relocate in the 1880s following tribal conflict in Karak. “We had to leave after a Bedouin-Muslim tribe attempted to take one of our women,” he said. “We are Bedouins too. So we killed him. And in our tradition, that means you leave to avoid bloodshed.”
Under Ottoman rule, these families were only permitted to settle directly atop the ruins of ancient Madaba. Ottoman authorities hoped this would erase evidence of the city’s Christian past. Ironically, it preserved it. As new homes rose, they revealed extensive Byzantine mosaics hidden beneath the rubble of centuries.
Contrary to first impressions, Madaba is not actually a Christian-majority city. While Christians once made up the bulk of the population, today they comprise around 20%, according to Fadi. “Still, compared to 1% in the rest of Jordan, that’s significant,” he said.
When asked about interfaith relations, Fadi was forthright, “Christians and Muslims here live peacefully. If we lose our King, we lose protection. But here, Muslims protect us. It’s not like Iraq or Syria.”
This pragmatic coexistence—based more on civic stability than religious tolerance—forms the backdrop to daily life in Madaba. On the streets, church bells and the call to prayer blend across the city’s soundscape, sometimes even overlapping, as I heard atop the bell tower.
4. Caritas: Refugee craft centre and Mosaic workshop
In a quiet side-room of a local church on King Hussein Street, refugee artisans from Iraq and Syria now continue Madaba’s millennia-old mosaic tradition. The workshop, supported by the Catholic Church’s charity arm Caritas, teaches both “old technique” and “new technique” methods of mosaic production.
“The old way takes a lot of time,” said Fadi. “It’s done upside-down in cement and can last thousands of years. The new way uses clay, done directly on the picture.” He gestures to a wall-mounted piece: “This is real stone—not painted. You see a lot of fakes today, but here, everything is original.”
You can visit the adjacent church and see a magnificent mosaic map on the floor of the courtyard, before popping into the Caritas centre to learn more about the mosaic workshops and techniques.
Read more: The King’s Highway: Driving the World’s Oldest Road
5. Visit the Shrine of the Beheading of St John the Baptist
If the St George mosaic represents Madaba’s artistic peak, the Roman Catholic Shrine of the Beheading of St John the Baptist offers a deep dive into its architectural layers. Built over Roman foundations and Byzantine ruins, the church is a literal and symbolic layering of faith.
“Madaba was empty after two major earthquakes in 750 and 1250,” said Fadi when he showed me the church. “The only people left were nomads moving through. When we came back in the 19th century, we built on the ruins. That’s how we preserved everything.”
Visitors to the shrine can descend into the undercroft to explore ancient cisterns, tunnels, and a mosaic floor left unrestored—its faded colours a stark contrast to the vibrant works on display elsewhere. Climbing the rickety bell tower offers a panoramic view of Madaba, where church spires and mosque minarets define the skyline.
6. Delve into history at Madaba Archaeological Park and Burnt Palace
Just a short walk from St George’s Church, the Madaba Archaeological Park houses several excavated mosaic floors and ruins, including parts of a Roman road. Among the highlights is the Burnt Palace, thought to have been the residence of a high-ranking Byzantine official. The name comes from evidence of fire damage, possibly linked to one of the earthquakes or later invasions.
Here you’ll also find the Hippolytus Hall mosaic, an intricate piece dating from the 6th century, which depicts scenes of classical mythology rarely found in Jordan. Its survival in a religiously conservative society adds another layer to the city’s already complex identity.
7. See more mosaics at Madaba Museum
The Madaba Museum isn’t just a display of relics—it’s part of the town’s living Christian quarter. Built over the remains of ancient houses and a 6th-century cathedral, the museum houses original mosaics left in situ.
“These were private homes, built by our ancestors,” said Fadi. “They found mosaics in the floors when building their houses. Some of them preserved them perfectly.”
This idea of living atop the past defines much of Madaba’s urban reality. It is a place where modernity has grown around relics, not replaced them, and you can really feel and see this at the Madaba Museum.
8. Eat and read at Kawon Bookshop
Not everything in Madaba is religious or ancient. Tucked down a quiet alleyway is the Kawon Bookshop—the city’s first independent bookshop and cultural centre. Started in 2016 by a former street bookseller, the shop doubles as a venue for cultural exchange and creative residencies.
“We built everything from recycled materials,” the founder explained. “Volunteers came from Taiwan, France, and Germany. We created something different—a space for stories, ideas and food.”
Indeed, the shop also houses a vegetarian café and a kitchen garden, hinting at the new directions Madaba’s younger generation may take.
Read more: Amman: A Culinary Tour Through Political History
9. See early Christian art in the Church of the Apostles
The Church of the Apostles is a 6th-century Byzantine structure that contains one of the most technically sophisticated and thematically unusual mosaics in Jordan.
The church was constructed in 578 CE, and like many other ecclesiastical buildings in Madaba, it was abandoned after the devastating earthquakes that struck the region in the 8th century. What survived, however, was its mosaic floor, rediscovered and partially restored in the 20th century. It is now preserved under a modern shelter, with a small chapel adjacent.
At the centre of the floor is an extraordinary mosaic medallion bearing the name of the artist: Salomios, one of the few mosaicists from late antiquity whose name survives. Surrounding the central inscription is a personification of the sea, rendered as a female figure flanked by a range of exotic marine life, birds, and allegorical symbols. Around the periphery, the names of the Twelve Apostles are inscribed, though much of the outer sections have suffered damage.
Unlike the more formal cartographic mosaic in St George’s Church, the Apostles mosaic is full of vitality, and its iconography hints at a blend of Christian symbolism and Greco-Roman mythological influence. The sea goddess is a particularly rare inclusion in church floor mosaics and has led scholars to reconsider how early Christian communities in the Levant viewed classical imagery.
10. Dine on fresh Jordanian cuisine at Carob House
Tucked into a quiet corner of Madaba, just beyond the tourist trail, Carob House is more than a restaurant. It’s a working model of what cultural sustainability can look like in practice — combining organic agriculture, culinary heritage, and local economic empowerment in one of Jordan’s oldest towns.
Set in a restored Ottoman-era stone house, Carob House is built around a simple principle: “regenerative hospitality.” The vegetables come from the owners’ own organic farm on the outskirts of town. The eggs are laid by local hens. Even the bread is baked from locally milled grain. But this isn’t a curated experience for visitors — it’s a serious effort to create a closed-loop food system, rooted in place and history.
The menu is drawn from traditional Jordanian and Levantine dishes, many of them rooted in rural Christian culinary traditions that are rarely spotlighted in contemporary dining. The freekeh salad, lamb with jameed, or seasonal vegetable dishes often come with stories — not only about ingredients, but about the people who grew them.
The project also works with local artisans and producers, many of them women or refugees, offering dignified employment and reintroducing traditional skills into the local economy. From fermentation workshops to heritage seed-saving initiatives, Carob House functions as a quiet node of resistance against cultural and ecological loss.
Read more: The Hejaz Railway: A Plan to United the Middle East by Rail
11. Day trip to Mount Nebo
A short drive west of Madaba leads to Mount Nebo, the hill from which Moses is said to have glimpsed the Promised Land before his death. While outside Madaba proper, the site forms an integral part of its religious tourism ecosystem. Pope John Paul II visited the site in 2000; Pope Francis followed in 2014.
Fadi recounted: “Pope Francis gave money for the roads to be rebuilt to the baptism site and Mount Nebo. It’s not just history—it’s living religion.”
The view from Mount Nebo, on a clear day, extends across the Jordan Valley into Israel and Palestine, linking the geographical with the theological in a single gaze. Fadi can organise tours if you don’t have a rental vehicle to visit Mount Nebo yourself.
As Fadi summed up at the end of his tour, “Most people come to Madaba just to see the map mosaic. That’s not enough. There are many other places, more beautiful than Petra itself.”
Whether or not that last remark holds true is subjective, but what is certain is that Madaba offers a fascinating insight into Jordan’s often hidden diversity. It’s not only about what has been uncovered from the past, but how people have adapted, preserved, and lived among it.
Map of the best things to do in Madaba
Here’s a map of the best things to do in Madaba:
There you have it, the best things to do in Madaba! What’s top of your Madaba bucket list?
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