As-Salt - The Place of Tolerance and Urban Hospitality
The city of As Salt is located on three densely packed hills in the Barka Highlands in west-central Jordan and is an important trade link between the eastern desert and the west. During the last 60 years of Ottoman rule, the area prospered due to the arrival and settlement of merchants from Nablus, Syria and Lebanon, who made their fortunes through trade, banking and agriculture. This prosperity attracted skilled craftsmen from different parts of the region, who worked to transform this humble rural settlement into a thriving town with a unique layout and an architectural style characterized by large public buildings and family homes built from local yellow limestone. The urban core of the site includes approximately 650 important historic buildings, which blend European Art Nouveau and neo-colonial styles with local traditions. The city's non-segregated development reflects tolerance between Muslims and Christians, who developed a tradition of hospitality, which is reflected in the Madafas (guesthouses, called Dawaween) and the social welfare system Takaful Ijtimai'. These tangible and intangible aspects emerged through the fusion of rural traditions with the practices of bourgeois merchants and artisans during the golden age of Sarthe's development, from the 1860s to the 1920s.