60 pieces · NaturePhoto by Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. A small stepped sandstone hill standing between two larger massifs on the floor of Wadi Rum — the Valley of the Moon — in southern Jordan, with a wind-blown dune spilling down the rock and the red sand of the main valley in front.
PuzzleBeat
Red Sands of Wadi Rum
Enjoy this nature scene as a free online jigsaw. Pick your piece count and start solving in your browser.
This nature jigsaw runs entirely in your browser. Choose difficulty on the play screen, use the optional timer to race your best score, or upload a personal photo for a custom puzzle anytime.
No download, no account — just tap play and start placing shaped pieces on the board.
Red Sands of Wadi Rum
Wadi Rum is the largest valley in Jordan — about 720 square kilometres, roughly 280 square miles — cut into sandstone and granite in the far south of the country, near the Saudi border and some 60 kilometres east of the port city of Aqaba. Its other name, the Valley of the Moon, is the one that sticks, and standing on the floor of it you can see why: flat sand running out to the base of cliffs that rise almost vertically, with nothing gradual in between. The small stepped hill in the middle of this photograph is the scene in miniature — a block of rock sitting on open sand as though it were set down there, with a dune of wind-blown sand climbing the shaded side behind it.
The geology explains the shapes. The cliffs are Umm Ishrin sandstone, iron-rich and stubbornly resistant to erosion, which is why they weather into sheer walls rather than slopes; the iron is also what gives the sand its colour. Underneath that sandstone lies much older granite, and where the two meet, water emerges as springs on the eastern slopes — the reason anything lives out here at all. The valley floors between the massifs are filled with alluvial sediment and blown sand, and the wind builds dunes in several distinct forms: barchans out on the flat, climbing dunes that ramp all the way to the tops of hills, and echo dunes made of sand that has crawled over a ridge and settled on the sheltered side. People have been leaving marks on these walls since prehistory — Khaz'ali Canyon holds petroglyphs of humans and antelopes dating to Thamudic times, and the Nabataeans left inscriptions and temple ruins. The Wadi Rum Protected Area has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2011.
As a jigsaw, the difficulty is split very unevenly between the top and bottom halves. The rock does most of the work for you: the pale, banded cliff on the left and the darker massif on the right both have strong horizontal strata, so pieces carry obvious lines to match, and the stepped hill in the centre is the single most distinctive object in the frame. Build those three first, then the thin wedge of hazy blue-grey peaks visible in the gap between them. The sky is easier than it looks because the one long streak of cloud gives the upper band an anchor and a direction. Save the foreground for last and expect it to be the slow part — it is a wide field of near-uniform red sand, and the only usable cues are the faint vehicle tracks curving through it and the scattering of small dark stones, so work outward from the tracks rather than hunting for colour changes that are not there.
How to play
- Tap Play Red Sands of Wadi Rum puzzle to open the puzzle board, then choose your piece count and difficulty.
- Drag pieces from the tray onto the board and snap them into place until the full image is complete. Works with mouse on desktop and touch on mobile.
- Use the Preview button on the play screen to peek at the full reference image whenever you need a hint.
- When you finish, check your solve time on the completion screen and share it with friends to see who can beat your record.
Frequently asked questions
- Where is Wadi Rum?
- In southern Jordan, close to the border with Saudi Arabia and about 60 kilometres — roughly 37 miles — east of Aqaba on the Red Sea. It is the largest wadi, or river valley, in Jordan, covering around 720 square kilometres, and the surrounding Wadi Rum Protected Area has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2011.
- Why is the sand red?
- Iron. The cliffs are Umm Ishrin sandstone, which is iron-rich and highly resistant to erosion — the iron tints the rock, and as the rock breaks down it tints the sand that collects at the bottom. That same resistance to erosion is why the mountains here weather into near-vertical walls rising straight out of flat valley floors instead of into gentler slopes.
- Why is it called the Valley of the Moon?
- It is a descriptive nickname — Wadi al-Qamar in Arabic — for a landscape of bare rock and open sand that reads as other-worldly. The formal name Wadi Rum, or Wadi Ramm, is thought to derive from Iram of the Pillars, a lost city mentioned in the Quran. The valley has also been photographed and filmed often enough to stand in for other planets on screen.
- Who lives in Wadi Rum?
- The village of Wadi Rum has several hundred Bedouin inhabitants, mostly of the Zalabieh, who settled in the area around 1980, living in a mix of goat-hair tents and concrete houses. The village has schools, a few shops and the headquarters of the Desert Patrol. The valley is also well known for the petroglyphs and inscriptions left across it by earlier cultures, including the Nabataeans.