AlUla travel guide: what to see, and how long you need

AlUla is the single most impressive place in Saudi Arabia for most first-time visitors, and the one most often rushed. Two days is not enough. Here is what is actually there.

Hegra

Saudi Arabia’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the reason most people come. Hegra was the southern city of the Nabataeans — the same civilisation that built Petra — and it holds well over a hundred monumental tombs carved into freestanding sandstone outcrops across a desert plain.

The most photographed is Qasr al-Farid, the “lonely castle”: a tomb that was never finished, standing by itself. Hegra is visited on a guided tour with a licensed local rawi (storyteller); you cannot simply drive in. Allow a half day.

Dadan and Jabal Ikmah

Older than Hegra. Dadan was the capital of the Dadanite and Lihyanite kingdoms, with lion tombs cut high into a red cliff face. A short drive away, Jabal Ikmah is a narrow canyon whose walls are covered in inscriptions in Dadanitic, Thamudic, Minaean and Nabataean — an open-air library that records what people traded, prayed for and argued about. Allow a half day for both.

Elephant Rock

A natural sandstone arch about eleven kilometres from the town, shaped, unmistakably, like an elephant with its trunk down. It is free to visit, there is seating sunk into the sand, and it is at its best in the last hour before sunset. Allow an hour, and go late.

AlUla Old Town

An abandoned mud-brick settlement of around 900 houses, occupied until the 1980s and now partly restored, with a market street of small shops and cafés. Best in the evening when it is lit. Allow two hours.

Sharaan Nature Reserve

Canyon country north of the oasis, reached by 4×4, where Arabian oryx, ibex and gazelle have been reintroduced. Half a day, and worth it if you want landscape rather than archaeology.

Maraya

A concert hall clad entirely in mirrors, which makes it disappear into the valley around it — it holds a Guinness record as the largest mirrored building in the world. You can photograph it from outside; going in depends on the events programme.

A sensible three-day shape

1. Day one: arrive, settle, sunset at Elephant Rock.
2. Day two: Hegra in the morning, Dadan and Jabal Ikmah in the afternoon.
3. Day three: Sharaan by 4×4, then Old Town in the evening.

That is exactly the shape of our four-day AlUla break, with the fourth day left free for departure.

Common questions