We’ve outlined a route beginning at 1st Circle, but you could instead pick up a detailed (free) Jabal Amman Walking Trail leaflet at the small information office at 36 Rainbow Street, or at Wild Jordan.
Rainbow Street
Perhaps Amman’s most famous thoroughfare, Rainbow Street has become known for two things: cafés and traffic. Of the former there are dozens, both on and just off the street: this has become one of the city’s prime spots for socializing. All tastes are catered for – there are traditional coffee houses, zingy contemporary espresso bars, cosy hideaways for organic tea-lovers and swanky DJ venues, alongside antiques shops, craft studios, edgy fast-food hangouts, top-quality restaurants…it’s quite a whirl. All attractions, though, are crammed onto what is effectively a narrow, semi-residential one-way street: traffic on weekend evenings in particular can be disastrous. It can take half an hour to drive a few hundred metres.
On foot, though – cafés, shops and restaurants notwithstanding – Rainbow Street is a window into another Amman. As you head east from 1st Circle, the street (named after the renovated Rainbow Cinema on the right) bustles with activity on the stroll to the walled-off British Council. Beyond here, the road dips sharply; partway along on the left is the Al Safadi mosque, with a fine old minaret. On a minor street to the right, an anonymous-looking townhouse, in a dark shade of plaster and sporting curved Art Deco-style balcony railings, was where King Talal lived for a time before his accession, and where both the late King Hussein and his brother Prince Hassan were born.
Fawzi Malouf Street
Two of the most attractive villas in the area, both well signposted, are beside each other on Fawzi Malouf Street – also known as “Souk Jara Street” after the summer street market here – about 250m east of the British Council. On the Rainbow Street corner stands an elegant symmetrical villa set back from the street and faced in local stone, with a stepped portico and tall, slender windows; it is now used as showrooms for the crafts of Jordan River Designs and Bani Hamida. Alongside it is a one-storey villa – once home to Major Alec Kirkbride, the first British Ambassador to Jordan – with a beautiful portico of pointed arches, wrought-iron window-bars, and a lovely garden centred on a star-shaped fountain. Both these houses were built in the late 1920s by Salim Al Odat, an architect originally from Karak.
Just round the corner with Asfour Street is a pair of houses built for Egyptian businessman and adviser to Emir Abdullah, Ismail Bilbaysi, a smaller one dating from the 1930s with a semicircular balcony featuring a lavishly painted ceiling visible from the street, and beside it a much larger villa designed in the 1940s in a consciously medieval Mamluke style, with bands of alternating pink and white stone and pointed arches.
Omar bin al-Khattab Street (Mango Street)
Continuing east past more cafés and crafts outlets down Rainbow Street, you come to the distinctively modernistic Mango House on the right, at the corner with Omar bin al-Khattab Street (aka Mango Street). In smooth, reddish stone with curving, pillared balconies, it was built in the late 1940s by Kamal and Ali Mango, members of one of Amman’s most prominent business dynasties. On the other side of Rainbow Street is a long, low house, the whole facade of which is sheltered beneath an elegant Circassian-style porticoed balcony; its most famous resident was Said Al Mufti, a Circassian who was prime minister in the 1950s and also mayor of Amman. Following Mango Street to the right brings you past more cafés and another fine villa, now home to the Royal Film Commission, before – on the right – the widely known Books@Café, an attractive bookshop and café-bar shoehorned into another historic old house. A few doors further is the print gallery Jacaranda, past which the road climbs to a mini-roundabout; to the right is the Al Pasha hammam, while straight on leads in the direction of 2nd Circle, past numerous shops.
