Best Traditional Saudi Arabian AlUla - Hegra UNESCO 2008, Elephant Rock, Jabal Ikmah, Dadan, Old Town and Saudi Deep Heritage Tour Destinations
Browse more guides: Saudi Arabia travel | Asia destinations Best Traditional Saudi Arabian AlUla - Hegra UNESCO 2008, Elephant Rock, Jabal Ikmah, Dadan, Old Town and Saudi Deep Heritage Tour Destinations TL;DR AlUla is the most surprising place I have written about in five years of running this blog, and it has every reason to be on a serious traveller's shortlist for the next three winters. The county covers roughly 22,500 km² of the Madinah Province in north-west Saudi Arabia, sits about 1,100 km from Riyadh and 380 km from Medina, and only opened to leisure tourism in late 2019 under Vision 2030. Before that, almost nobody outside Saudi archaeology circles had walked these valleys. The headline is Hegra, also called Mada'in Salih, which became Saudi Arabia's first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008 and remains the only major Nabataean settlement outside Petra in Jordan. Hegra holds 111 monumental rock-cut tombs carved between roughly the 1st century BC and the 1st c...