AlUla & Hegra
AlUla is the valley in the north-west of Saudi Arabia where the Nabataeans built their second city, and where the kingdom, since it opened to visitors in 2019, has built its first great tourism: Hegra — Mada'in Salih — a hundred and eleven monumental tombs cut into outcrops of sandstone across a plain, the lonely Qasr al-Farid the most photographed of them, a UNESCO site since 2008 and the country's first; Dadan, the older capital of the Lihyanites, with its lion tombs in the cliff; Jabal Ikmah, an open-air library of inscriptions in the rock; the Old Town of AlUla, nine hundred mud houses under a castle rock, abandoned in the 1980s and now restored lane by lane; and the oasis itself, two million date palms in the wadi between the cliffs. Around them the new AlUla: Maraya, the mirrored concert hall in the Ashar valley that vanishes into the desert; the Elephant Rock at sunset with its cafés in the sand; the Sharaan nature reserve, where the Arabian leopard is being bred back; the balloons of the winter festival; and the Hijaz railway station where the Ottoman line to Medina stopped. Medina is four hours south, and AlUla has its own airport.
The traveller flies to AlUla, sleeps in one of the resorts in the canyons or in a house of the Old Town, and books everything ahead through the commission's site, because Hegra and Dadan are visited by tour and by slot: Hegra in the morning, the tombs by bus and on foot with a rawi, a storyteller-guide, the Diwan and Jabal Ithlib's canyon, the railway station; Dadan and Jabal Ikmah after; the Old Town at dusk, the lanes and the castle rock, and dinner on the oasis path; the second day the Elephant Rock at sunset from a cushion in the sand, or a balloon at dawn in the season, or Sharaan by 4×4; and, if the calendar allows, a concert at Maraya, which is the strangest and finest room in the desert.
The Guide's honesty: AlUla is expensive by design — the resorts are among the world's dearest and the tours are booked, timed and guided —, and the traveller who comes off-season or sleeps in the town's simpler houses finds it gentler; the kingdom's visa is a form online, its dress is modest and its alcohol is absent, and the welcome, in AlUla especially, is warm and practised; the heat from April is real and Hegra is a dawn site; and Qasr al-Farid at first light, alone on its plain with the cliffs going pink behind it, is the equal of anything at Petra, with a hundredth of the crowd, which is why the Guide opens this page with pleasure.