Pella is located in the Jordan Valley and in nice surroundings visitors see ancient ruins from Roman and Byzantine period. Pella was like the city of Gadara a member of the Decapolis, a union of cities in Palestine, Jordan and southern Syria which were centres of Greco-Roman culture.

Known in Arabic as Tabaqat Fahl, Pella has been continuously occupied for 6000 years from the Neolithic to the Byzantine and early Islamic periods (5000 BC- circa 800 AD). Like Jerash and Umm Quais it prospered during the Greco-Roman period from the links to trade routes and different cultural influences. After the Roman conquest Pella became a member of the Decapolis, the conferderation of ten cities linked by commercial and political interests.

In the 1st century Christians took refuge in Pella fleeing the Great Jewish Revolt. Therefore the city was the site of one of Christianity's earliest churches. After the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 Islam dominated the region and Pella received the Arabic name Fahl. The city was destroyed by an earthquake in 749.

Only small portions of the ruins have been excavated. The University of Sydney and the Jordanian Department of Antiquities conducting excavations at Pella since 1979. Besides the excavated ruins from the Greco-Roman period, including an Odeon, Pella offers visitors remains of a Chalcolithic settlement from the 4th millennium BC, the remains of Bronze and Iron Age walled cities, Byzantine churches and houses, an early Islamic residential quarter, and a small medieval mosque with a graveyard.