Explore Saudi Arabia

Riyadh

The Saudi capital has transformed itself within a single generation from a dusty administrative town into a skyline of glass towers, world-class museums and Formula 1 race circuits. The National Museum traces 15,000 years of Arabian history, the Diriyah heritage district sits on the outskirts, and the Riyadh Season entertainment festival turns the city into a month-long spectacle every winter.

Jeddah

Saudi Arabia's most cosmopolitan city lines the Red Sea coast and wears its centuries-old mercantile history in the coral-stone towers and labyrinthine lanes of Al-Balad, the UNESCO-listed old town. The Corniche stretches 30 kilometres along the waterfront past the King Fahd Fountain — the world's tallest — while the dive sites just offshore offer some of the finest reef snorkelling in the Arabian Peninsula.

AlUla

Tucked into a dramatic sandstone canyon in the northwest, AlUla is Saudi Arabia's most breathtaking open-air museum — a 200,000-year continuum of human habitation culminating in the Nabataean rock-cut tombs of Hegra (Madâin Sâlih), the country's first UNESCO World Heritage Site. Every January the Winter at Tantora festival fills the ancient landscape with contemporary art, concerts and camel races beneath skies undimmed by city lights.

Mecca

The holiest city in Islam draws millions of Muslim pilgrims every year to perform the Hajj and Umrah — the Grand Mosque, with the Kaaba at its centre, is the spiritual focal point of over a billion people worldwide. Access is restricted to Muslims, making Mecca one of the few cities on earth that is both globally famous and largely unseen by the majority of its admirers.

Medina

Saudi Arabia's second holiest city is home to the Prophet's Mosque, one of the largest mosques in the world, which houses the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad and draws tens of millions of pilgrims annually. Like Mecca, access to the central religious sites is restricted to Muslims, but the city's palm-lined streets and atmosphere of quiet devotion are unlike anywhere else on earth.

Diriyah

The mud-brick birthplace of the Saudi state sits in the Wadi Hanifah just outside Riyadh, its At-Turaif district a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the centrepiece of an ambitious restoration turning the original Al Saud capital into a living heritage quarter. The narrow alleys of rammed-earth towers, once home to the founding rulers of modern Saudi Arabia, are best seen lit amber at dusk when the clay walls glow like embers.

Abha

The mountain capital of Asir Province sits at 2,200 metres above sea level, a world apart from the desert kingdoms below — green terraced hillsides, misty escarpments, and a cool climate that make it a beloved summer retreat for Saudis. The cable car that sweeps over the Abha Dam reservoir and the nearby heritage village of Rijal Alma'a, with its spectacular multi-storey fortress towers, make the journey south well worthwhile.

Taif

Perched on a granite plateau at 1,800 metres, Taif has been the summer capital of the Hejaz for centuries and is famous across Arabia for its roses — the Taif rose festival each spring draws visitors to witness the distillation of oud rose oil, one of the world's most prized perfume ingredients. The ruined palace of Shubra, the honey souks and the mountain road down to Mecca make it an underrated stop on any Hejaz itinerary.

Dammam

The gateway to Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province and its vast oil wealth, Dammam is a modern Gulf city with a pleasant corniche along the Arabian Gulf and close proximity to the ancient Al-Ahsa Oasis. The King Fahd Causeway, connecting Saudi Arabia to Bahrain across 25 kilometres of sea, begins just to the north of the city.

Al Khobar

The most visitor-friendly city in the Eastern Province, Al Khobar lines the Arabian Gulf with a wide waterfront boulevard of restaurants and cafés that has more in common with a Mediterranean resort town than a traditional Gulf city. The Half Moon Bay beach resort just to the south is one of the best swimming spots on Saudi Arabia's eastern coast.

Yanbu

Saudi Arabia's main Red Sea industrial port hides a world-class diving secret in the clear waters offshore — pristine coral reefs, shipwrecks and sea turtles accessible from a small resort strip north of the old town. Yanbu al-Bahr, the historic quarter, has quiet Ottoman-era streets and a heritage museum that tells the story of a port city that once served the Hejaz Railway and the great Mecca pilgrim fleets.

Tabuk

In the far northwest near the border with Jordan, Tabuk is the gateway to the Hisma Desert — a landscape of volcanic black plains broken by extraordinary sandstone pillars and basalt fields that looks like another planet. The scuba diving at Sharma and Gayal on the Gulf of Aqaba rivals anything in the Red Sea, and the ruins of the original Hejaz Railway station stand as a haunting monument to the age of steam in Arabia.

Ha'il

The city of Ha'il serves as the base for exploring one of Saudi Arabia's most extraordinary UNESCO sites — the rock art of the Hail Region, thousands of carvings etched into basalt desert at Jubbah and Shuwaymis over a 10,000-year span. The A'arif Fort overlooking the city and the dramatic granite peaks of the Aja and Salma mountain ranges make Ha'il a compelling stop on any northern circuit of the kingdom.

Al-Ahsa

The Al-Ahsa Oasis in the Eastern Province is the world's largest natural oasis — a UNESCO-listed cultural landscape of date palms, artesian springs, mud-brick villages and ancient forts that has sustained human life in the heart of the Arabian desert for millennia. The Friday market, where hundreds of varieties of dates and traditional crafts are traded as they have been for centuries, is one of the most atmospheric experiences in the kingdom.

Najran

In the far south near the Yemeni border, Najran is one of Saudi Arabia's most ancient cities — the Ukhdud fortress and surrounding ruins mark the site of a pre-Islamic community that appears in the Quran, and the multi-storey mud-brick towers of the Najran region are among the most striking vernacular architecture in Arabia. The surrounding valley is green and fertile, lined with date palms and a way of life that has changed little over centuries.

Jizan

The coastal city of Jizan in the far southwest is the jumping-off point for the Farasan Islands — a pristine Red Sea archipelago of coral reefs, flamingo colonies and ancient Roman inscriptions that remains largely unvisited by international tourists. The dramatic Fifa and Bani Malik mountains rising sharply behind the coast have verdant terraced villages with a cultural character distinct from anywhere else in the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia's first UNESCO World Heritage Site is a Nabataean settlement of 111 monumental rock-cut tombs carved into rose-red sandstone cliffs in the Hejaz desert — a southern extension of the Petra culture that flourished from the first century BC. The scale and preservation of the facades, some soaring 22 metres high and still engraved with their Nabataean inscriptions, make Hegra one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites in the Middle East, now the centrepiece of the AlUla cultural district open to visitors year-round.

The mud-brick citadel of At-Turaif in Diriyah's Wadi Hanifah was the seat of the First Saudi State and the original capital of the Al Saud dynasty in the eighteenth century, before it was razed by Ottoman forces in 1818. The restored Najdi-style rammed-earth architecture — with its distinctive stepped parapets, ventilation towers and interlocking rooms — is the most important monument to the founding of the modern Saudi state and now forms the heart of a major heritage restoration project.

The old city of Al-Balad in Jeddah was for centuries the principal port of entry for millions of pilgrims bound for Mecca, and its remarkable coral-stone tower houses — some seven storeys tall, their facades carved with intricately latticed wooden balconies called Rawasheen — are among the finest examples of vernacular Islamic urban architecture anywhere in the world. The warren of souks, mosques and merchant quarters along Jeddah's medieval waterfront is alive with commerce and daily life that has changed little in its essentials for 400 years.

The basalt plains and sandstone outcrops around Jubbah and Shuwaymis in the Hail region carry one of the world's densest concentrations of rock art — over 10,000 years of human record, from Ice Age fauna long extinct in Arabia to camels, horses, warriors and inscriptions in Thamudic and Lihyanite scripts. The engravings chart the climatic shifts that transformed a green savannah into the desert it is today, making this a unique archive of both environmental and human history carved directly into the living rock.

The largest natural oasis on earth, Al-Ahsa encompasses over 2.5 million date palms fed by artesian springs alongside mud-brick towns, traditional earthen forts, canals and a landscape shaped by 6,000 years of settled agriculture in the Eastern Province. The oasis has sustained continuous human occupation longer than almost any other site in Arabia, and its ancient pools, mosques and fort complexes remain in active use by the communities that have tended its palms for millennia.

The Hima cultural area in the Najran region of southern Saudi Arabia is one of the world's largest rock art sites, with thousands of inscriptions and engravings spanning from the Neolithic to the Islamic period alongside ancient wells that served caravan routes connecting Arabia to Africa and the Mediterranean. The site documents the evolution of early Arabian scripts — including proto-Sinaitic, Thamudic and Musnad — making it one of the most important archives of pre-Islamic Arabian literacy ever discovered.

A vast wilderness of interlocking sand dunes in the southwestern Rub' al Khali — the Empty Quarter — 'Uruq Bani Ma'arid is one of the last intact habitats of the Arabian sand gazelle, the oryx and the reem gazelle, all recovered from near-extinction through decades of dedicated conservation. The dune systems here, among the world's largest, shift and reform across a landscape that has remained virtually untouched since the great Arabian caravan routes fell silent centuries ago.

The ancient trading city of Qaryat al-Faw in the Rub' al Khali once sat at the crossroads of caravan routes linking Najran to the Gulf and Yemen to Mesopotamia, flourishing from around the third century BC to the fourth century AD as a Kindite kingdom capital. Excavations have revealed temples, a market street, residential quarters and thousands of artefacts that paint a vivid picture of life in one of pre-Islamic Arabia's most cosmopolitan cities, inscribed in 2024 as Saudi Arabia's most recently recognised World Heritage Site.