Amman · With kids

A hands-on museum in King Hussein Park with about 150 exhibits — a flight simulator built round an A318 fuselage, optics, magnets, a human body section and a water and energy gallery aimed at Jordan's own resources. Tickets are sold online and it is aimed at roughly 3 to 12 year olds.

In the same park: over a hundred cars and motorcycles from the Hashemite royal collection, laid out across a Classic Hall, a Royal Hall and a sports car hall, with a free bilingual audio guide app in English and Arabic. Reliable with older children and teenagers who have had enough of ruins.

The large municipal park in west Amman that both museums sit inside, with lawns, paths, cycle hire and playgrounds, and free to walk into. It is the one place in the city where children can run without traffic, and it fills with Jordanian families on Friday afternoons and through the evening in summer.

The visitor centre of the RSCN, the body that runs Jordan's nature reserves, on the edge of Jabal Amman with a terrace looking over downtown. It is a low-effort stop — nature displays, a shop of reserve-made products and a café — and useful for planning the reserves at Ajloun and Dana with children.

Amman is nineteen hills of steep streets, long staircases and intermittent pavements, and the downtown sights involve real climbs. A carrier works where a pushchair does not, taxis are cheap enough to use freely between neighbourhoods, and summer afternoons are hot enough that most families do their outdoor time after 5pm.