Rummanah campsite reopens after winter break

AMMAN — The Dana Biosphere Reserve’s Rummanah campsite has reopened for a new tourist season, with the addition of 10 deluxe tents, Director Amer Rfou said on Thursday.

The 10 deluxe tents are powered on solar energy and offer beds for additional comfort for the visitors, Rfou told The Jordan Times, adding that they also guarantee users more privacy.

The tents were introduced to the Rummanah campsite late last tourist season, according to Rfou, who added that the campsite now features 20 tents.

Although the reserve management increased the number of tents, the campsite’s capacity of 60-80 overnight-visitors remained unchanged, to minimise disturbances to the reserve’s ecosystem.

The Rummanah campsite opens for tourists in spring and closes in November every year, when temperatures at the reserve, located on steep mountains, deep valleys and plains, drop.

The reserve provides a range of tourist facilities, including a guesthouse and an eco-lodge, but only the campsite is shut down during winter, according to the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), which established and manages the reserve.

According to the RSCN 2015 annual report,  the majority of the reserve’s visitors are Jordanians, noting that they make up 80 per cent of the total visitors.

The report noted that during 2015, a total of 20,818 visitors stayed at the Rummanah campsite, including 5,834 at the guesthouse.

Spread over 300 square kilometres, the reserve is located in Tafileh Governorate, 180km southwest of the capital.

Dana is Jordan’s largest and most diverse nature reserve with 833 types of vegetation constituting 50 per cent of the total flora in the country.

Established in 1989, the nature reserve is globally important for being the southernmost remaining forest community of pencil pine, and for containing three rare plants that exist only in Dana and are named after the area: Silene danansis, Micromeria danaensis and Rubia danaeansis.

Dana is also an important bird-watching site as it is home to 216 kinds of birds, many of which are globally threatened, and 38 mammals, mainly the Nubian ibex, Eurasian lynx, hyenas and Blanford’s fox.