AlUla is a valley of sandstone outcrops in the north-west of the country, a couple of hours by air from Riyadh or Jeddah. It is the destination people fly to rather than drive to, and that changes what you can build: a group arrives together, stays together and has a day or two with nothing else to do.

What is here is not a city to walk through. It is a landscape with things carved into it, and the activities get built around one site at a time rather than strung across a town.

Worth knowing

November to March, like the rest of the country, and here the nights go genuinely cold: the valley sits high and loses its heat as soon as the sun is down. An evening outdoors needs more than a jacket in January.

Access is managed. AlUla is a planned destination with its own authority, permits and approved operators, which means a programme here is booked earlier than one in Riyadh and has fewer things that can be moved at the last minute. It is worth asking months ahead rather than weeks.

There is an airport with direct flights from Riyadh and Jeddah, and the flying time is what makes a two-day programme realistic at all.

Things people don’t always know

Hegra is Petra’s sister city. The Nabataeans who cut the tombs at Petra also cut these, more than a hundred of them, into the outcrops here. It was the first site in Saudi Arabia that UNESCO put on the World Heritage list, in 2008, and for most of the twentieth century almost nobody saw it.

Dadan was here first. Before the Nabataeans, this valley was the capital of the kingdoms of Dadan and Lihyan, with tombs cut high into a cliff face. The place was a stop on the route that carried incense north, which is the whole reason anybody built here.

Jabal AlFil is a rock that looks like an elephant. It is a sandstone outcrop with an arch worn through it at the bottom, and from one angle the resemblance is exact. It has become the place groups photograph themselves at the end of a day.

Maraya is a concert hall clad entirely in mirrors. From a distance it disappears into the valley it stands in. It is the venue for the evening part of a programme, and it does half the work before anybody performs.

What we bring to AlUla

Because access is organised site by site, the formats that work here are the ones built around a single place: a treasure hunt among the outcrops, a route with the rock faces as the fixed points, a day in the desert with something to solve in it. If you already have something in mind we adapt it; if you haven’t, we choose it together, looking at who the participants are and how long you have. All the activities →

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