AlUla

What is AlUla in Vision 2030?

AlUla is Saudi Arabia’s flagship Vision 2030 cultural heritage giga-project, pairing the Kingdom’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site at Hegra with a tourism model often compared with Diriyah. The ancient oasis city and governorate in Madinah Province contains 200,000 years of recorded human habitation. The county covers roughly 22,561 square kilometres of sandstone canyons, palm oasis, basalt plateaus and date-farming villages, and sits at the historic crossroads of the Incense Route that linked southern Arabia to the Levant and Egypt. Under Vision 2030, AlUla is governed by a dedicated royal commission alongside other cultural and tourism giga-projects including Red Sea Global, Qiddiya and NEOM.

AlUla’s core archaeological corridor stretches roughly 20 kilometres along a wadi flanked by sandstone outcrops. The major sites are Hegra, the Nabataean necropolis built between the first century BCE and the first century CE; Dadan, the capital of the Dadanite and later Lihyanite kingdoms dating from the ninth century BCE; Jabal Ikmah, an open-air library of more than 500 inscriptions in Dadanitic, Thamudic, Nabataean, Minaic, Greek and Arabic; and AlUla Old Town, a labyrinth of more than 900 mud-brick and stone houses occupied continuously until the 1980s. The Old Town was inducted in 2022 onto UN Tourism’s “Best Tourism Villages” list, and Jabal Ikmah was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2023, the second Saudi entry after Mecca’s medieval manuscripts.

The strategic logic for placing AlUla at the centre of Saudi heritage tourism is straightforward: it offers the only inscribed World Heritage monument in the country, a defensible “low-volume, high-value” yield model, and a pre-Islamic narrative that diversifies the Kingdom’s tourism appeal beyond religious pilgrimage. Where Diriyah anchors the founding-era story of the House of Saud, AlUla anchors the deep-time multicivilisational story.

Royal Commission for AlUla

The Royal Commission for AlUla, abbreviated RCU and frequently rendered as RCAlUla, was established by royal decree in July 2017 with a mandate spanning archaeology, hospitality, agriculture, transport, environmental management and resident services. It reports to the Crown Prince’s office rather than to a line ministry, mirroring the elevated political status given to other giga-projects funded outside conventional ministry budgets.

Abeer AlAkel, formerly the commission’s chief operating officer, was confirmed as CEO in 2024 after a period as acting chief, succeeding Amr AlMadani who had led the body through the launch of the masterplan and the first wave of hospitality openings. AlAkel is the first Saudi woman to lead a giga-project of this scale and oversees a workforce that the commission expects to grow to 38,000 jobs by 2035 from roughly 2,728 at the time of the 2024 update. The commission is chaired ex officio by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has visited the site repeatedly, including a December 2024 inspection of the Sharaan Resort excavation.

RCU’s funding profile is unusual within the Vision 2030 ecosystem. Until 2025, the commission was financed primarily through the Ministry of Finance rather than the Public Investment Fund, giving it more direct sovereign budget support but less commercial pressure than peer giga-projects. That posture is shifting. In October 2025 RCU went to the Reuters NEXT Gulf Summit in London with a tender book of SAR 6 billion (USD 1.6 billion) of projects open to private investors across hospitality, residential, and visitor-experience plays. AlUla Development Company, the PIF subsidiary that holds equity in operational hospitality and real estate assets, has emerged as the commercial counterpart to the commission’s regulatory role.

The flagship strategic document is the Journey Through Time masterplan, unveiled in April 2021 and structured around five districts strung along a 20-kilometre rejuvenated wadi: AlUla Old Town, Dadan, Jabal Ikmah, Nabataean Horizon and Hegra Historical City. The plan commits 9 kilometres of restored cultural oasis, 10 million square metres of green and open space, 15 new cultural assets including the Kingdoms Institute, 5,000 additional hotel keys and a 46-kilometre low-carbon tramway connecting the districts. Phase one delivery targets 2025-2026; full build-out runs to 2035.

A second framework, the “Path to Prosperity” plan, governs the residential, education and economic-diversification side of the territory, with a 38,000-job target and an SAR 120 billion (USD 32 billion) cumulative GDP contribution by 2035.

Hegra: Saudi’s First UNESCO Site

Hegra, also called Mada’in Saleh in modern Arabic, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2008 as the country’s first World Heritage property. The site occupies roughly 1,621 hectares and contains 111 monumental tombs, 94 of them decorated, carved into sandstone outcrops by the Nabataean kingdom between roughly 100 BCE and 100 CE. Hegra was the southern capital of the Nabataean kingdom, whose better-known northern capital was Petra in present-day Jordan; the architectural vocabulary at the two sites is closely related but Hegra is structurally better preserved because the soft sandstone has weathered more uniformly and because the site received less foot traffic during the modern era.

Active archaeological work at Hegra is led jointly by RCU and a French scientific mission directed by the CNRS, in line with the broader Franco-Saudi partnership. Excavations have catalogued residential quarters, a Nabataean defensive wall, the wells that sustained settlement, and a series of religious complexes. The 2024 opening of The Chedi Hegra, a 35-key luxury hotel that occupies adapted Hejaz Railway station buildings within the inscribed zone, made Hegra the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Arab world with a hotel inside its boundary. Visitor access remains tightly controlled: tours are guided, vehicle traffic is restricted to designated routes, and a daily cap is enforced to preserve the rock-cut facades.

Beyond Hegra itself, the broader Hegra Historical City district in the masterplan is intended to add interpretative facilities, a Nabataean-themed visitor centre and supporting hospitality, with a target of growing the site’s visitor base without exceeding carrying-capacity thresholds set with UNESCO and ICOMOS.

Hospitality Development: Habitas, Banyan Tree, and the Pipeline

AlUla’s hospitality offer was effectively zero in 2017. Eight years later it operates a portfolio of distinctive properties pitched at the upper-luxury and ultra-luxury tiers, with a deliberate avoidance of mass-market chain hotels. The first significant property was Habitas AlUla, opened by the Mexico-headquartered eco-luxury operator in November 2021 with 96 tented villas in the Ashar Valley. Habitas remains the largest hotel by key count and serves as the gateway for many international visitors.

Banyan Tree AlUla followed in 2022 with 47 tented villas in the same valley, operated under a partnership with Singapore-listed Banyan Group. The 2024 calendar year added two further openings of strategic importance: Dar Tantora The House Hotel, a 30-key adaptive reuse of mud-brick courtyard houses inside AlUla Old Town that is heated, cooled and lit largely through passive design, and The Chedi Hegra inside the World Heritage zone. Cloud7 Residence, a longer-stay product targeted at digital nomads and slow travellers, has also operated since 2023.

The forward pipeline announced through 2024-2026 is dominated by ultra-luxury brands. Three Aman Resorts properties are committed across distinct precincts within AlUla, with the first scheduled to open ahead of the Sharaan flagship. Six Senses has signed for a property within the Sharaan Nature Reserve. Mexican brand Azulik is building Azulik AlUla on a sandstone formation. Marriott International, through its Autograph Collection brand, is delivering NUMAJ, a 250-key resort whose construction was launched in early 2026 with a 2027 opening target. Marriott had earlier signed The Bethesda, a separate Autograph Collection property in central AlUla announced in 2023.

Total room count under the masterplan is 5,000 keys by 2035, against fewer than 700 operating in early 2025. Average daily rates at the operating luxury properties run between USD 700 and USD 2,000 in peak season, positioning AlUla in the same yield band as the Red Sea destination and well above conventional Gulf city-hotel benchmarks.

Maraya and Cultural Programming

Maraya, an Arabic term meaning “mirror,” is the 500-seat concert hall and convention venue clad in 9,740 mirrored panels that has held the Guinness World Record as the world’s largest mirrored building since its completion in 2019. Designed by Florian Boje of Italian firm Giò Forma, Maraya sits on the floor of the Ashar Valley and serves as the cultural programming engine for AlUla’s seasonal calendar.

The venue has hosted Andrea Bocelli on six occasions since 2020 across the Italian tenor’s residency at the venue, alongside John Legend, Alicia Keys, Lionel Richie, Norah Jones, Enrique Iglesias, Lang Lang, Helene Fischer, Hauser, Ludovico Einaudi and Matteo Bocelli. Programming clusters around Winter at Tantora, the flagship festival running between December and February that combines concerts, gallery exhibitions, hot-air balloon experiences, falconry events and a polo invitational. Summer programming has expanded since 2024 with cooler high-altitude offerings in nearby Sharaan and Gharameel.

The cultural slate is curated by RCU’s Arts and Creative Industries cluster and runs in parallel with two recurring contemporary art platforms: Desert X AlUla, the Saudi edition of the California-based site-specific exhibition that has run biennial editions in 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2026; and the AlUla Arts Festival, an umbrella moniker covering Wadi AlFann previews, gallery openings and the Madrasat Addeera arts education centre. AlUla also hosts artists-in-residence programmes through the Madrasat Addeera complex, an adaptive reuse of the village’s former girls’ school.

The cultural programming serves a measurable strategic function: it draws international media coverage, fills off-peak hotel inventory at premium rates, and gives RCU a visible platform on which to deploy female leadership, mixed audiences and contemporary art that would have been politically unimaginable in the Kingdom a decade earlier.

Wadi AlFann

Wadi AlFann, “Valley of the Arts,” is a 65-square-kilometre permanent open-air museum of monumental land art commissioned by RCU. The first wave of five artists named to the project was announced in 2022: American Light and Space pioneer James Turrell, American earthworks veteran Michael Heizer, conceptual artist Agnes Denes, Saudi artist Ahmed Mater, and Saudi artist Manal AlDowayan, who represented Saudi Arabia at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Subsequent commissions have expanded the roster.

Each artist receives a substantial site-specific footprint within the wadi, with the brief calling for permanent works that engage the geology, scale and silence of the location. Heizer’s commission has been described in published accounts as one of the artist’s largest interventions outside his signature “City” in Nevada. Turrell’s planned skyspace continues a three-decade lineage of similar works embedded in remote desert and mountain locations. Manal AlDowayan’s commission engages with rock-art traditions and oral histories specific to AlUla.

The phased opening had originally been signalled for 2024 but has been recalibrated. Public communications now point to a soft opening from 2026 timed to the AlUla Arts Festival programme, with the full permanent installation rolling through 2028 as the major site works are completed. Wadi AlFann is intended to function alongside Hegra and Maraya as the third anchor of AlUla’s draw, with explicit positioning against international peers including Naoshima in Japan and Marfa in Texas.

Sharaan and Future Projects

The Sharaan Nature Reserve is a 1,540-square-kilometre conservation area in the highlands south of AlUla town. It received IUCN Green List status in 2024, placing it among roughly 90 protected areas globally to meet the IUCN’s benchmark for governance, design and conservation outcome. The reserve hosts a programme of species reintroduction that has released approximately 1,500 animals across Arabian oryx, Arabian gazelle, sand gazelle and Nubian ibex, and supports recovering populations of Arabian wolf, Egyptian vulture and a recently confirmed sooty falcon breeding population estimated at 5 percent of the global vulnerable population during nesting season.

The flagship rewilding programme is the Arabian Leopard Conservation initiative. The species, classified Critically Endangered by IUCN with an estimated 120 individuals remaining in the wild as of 2026, has been bred at the captive-breeding centre that opened in 2019. RCU has announced 18 cubs born to date, and a new Arabian Leopard Rewilding Centre is under construction inside Sharaan as the precursor to the eventual reintroduction of the cats into protected wild habitat.

Within the same reserve sits the most photographed unfinished hotel in Saudi Arabia: the Sharaan Resort and International Summit Centre, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel and conceived as a cluster of suites and pavilions carved into a sandstone massif. The project broke ground with a ceremonial first rock excavation on 25 March 2024. Earlier projections had floated openings from 2023 onward; current public statements from RCU and the contractor target a 2026-2027 completion, with the 38-suite resort and a separate International Summit Centre delivered as a single integrated complex. Beyond Sharaan, the medium-term project pipeline includes the Kingdoms Institute, a research-and-display anchor for the masterplan; the AlUla tramway, a 46-kilometre low-carbon transit spine; and a series of smaller mid-market and family-oriented properties intended to broaden the visitor base beyond ultra-luxury.

AlUla International Airport

AlUla International Airport, IATA code ULH, sits roughly 25 kilometres south of the Old Town and underpins the destination’s commercial viability. The airport handled fewer than 100,000 passengers in 2019. A first expansion phase in 2020 raised annual capacity to 400,000. A second phase inaugurated in early 2026 raised capacity by a further 44 percent to roughly 700,000 passengers per year through a refurbished runway, additional aircraft stands and an expanded terminal layout.

The airport currently carries Saudia, Flynas and Flyadeal services from Riyadh and Jeddah, plus seasonal direct flights from Dubai (Emirates), Doha (Qatar Airways), Cairo, and a winter charter programme from European source markets timed to Winter at Tantora. A third expansion phase is in design, with published plans for a second terminal that would lift annual capacity to roughly 6 million passengers in support of the 2-million-visitor target by 2035. No fixed delivery date has been published for the second terminal as of mid-2026.

The airport functions as a constraint as much as an asset: until the second terminal is delivered, peak-season demand has to be managed through Riyadh and Jeddah hub connections rather than direct intercontinental service, which keeps cost-per-visitor elevated. RCU has cited connectivity as a leading priority in conversations with Saudia and the Saudi Tourism Authority.

Vision 2030 Tourism Strategy Role

Vision 2030’s tourism strategy targets a 10 percent contribution to GDP and 150 million annual visits by 2030. AlUla’s role in that arithmetic is concentrated rather than volume-leading. The destination is sized for 2 million annual visitors at full build-out, a fraction of the Red Sea’s planned 4.3 million or the much larger flows expected through Riyadh and Jeddah. AlUla’s contribution to the strategy is yield, brand and narrative.

On yield, the destination’s “low-volume, high-value” model is explicit. Average length of stay sits above three nights against the Saudi tourism average of roughly 1.7. Average daily spend at operating luxury properties is multiples of regional norms. The commission has been candid that visitor numbers will be capped to preserve the integrity of the heritage assets and the visual amenity of the landscape.

On brand, AlUla is the destination Saudi Arabia uses to introduce itself to upscale international audiences who would not otherwise consider the Kingdom. Hegra is the only single Saudi monument with global recognition comparable to Petra or the Pyramids. Maraya’s mirrored facade is the most globally circulated piece of contemporary Saudi architectural imagery. The cultural programming gives the country a credible foothold in conversations about contemporary art, conservation and architecture.

On narrative, AlUla shifts the centre of gravity of the official cultural story away from the post-1932 Saudi state and into a multi-civilisational deep time. That re-anchoring matters for the Vision 2030 project’s external positioning and for domestic conversations about heritage and identity. The recurring partnership with the French government through AFALULA gives the project a Western institutional cover that has been mobilised at COP, IUCN, UNESCO and bilateral state-visit settings.

Recent Developments 2024-2026

The 24 months between early 2024 and mid-2026 have been the most operationally consequential period in AlUla’s modern development. Visitor numbers grew to 286,000 in 2024 from 232,000 in 2023, a 23 percent increase, and crossed 300,000 in 2025 against a target of 380,000 in 2026. The first global marketing campaign, launched in 2024 across the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, China, India and Australia, drove a reported 9 percent year-on-year increase in international visitor share, and shifted the international/Saudi visitor split modestly from the legacy 28/72 baseline. Hotel occupied room nights grew by approximately 20 percent year-on-year, with summer and shoulder-season uplift exceeding 30 percent.

On the asset side, Dar Tantora and The Chedi Hegra both opened in 2024. The Sharaan Resort excavation began in March 2024. Sharaan Nature Reserve received IUCN Green List status in 2024. Jabal Ikmah was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2023 and recognised at the 2024 World Travel Awards. AlUla received the World Travel and Tourism Council’s “Tourism for Tomorrow” recognition and was named the World’s Top Cultural Tourism Project at industry awards through 2025.

On the financial and structural side, October 2025 saw RCU formally invite private investors to a SAR 6 billion (USD 1.6 billion) tender book at the Reuters NEXT Gulf Summit, signalling a partial pivot from sovereign-budget development to mixed financing. AlUla Development Company began construction on NUMAJ Autograph Collection in early 2026 as the first commercial output of the UDC vehicle. AI-driven monitoring across Sharaan and Hegra was profiled in early 2026 as the technology backbone for the conservation strategy, with sensor-based wildlife tracking and visitor-flow management.

A separate development worth flagging: Skift reported in April 2026 that elements of Saudi Arabia’s tourism funding architecture are being reorganised within the broader Vision 2030 mid-cycle review. AlUla’s pivot to private capital appears to fit that wider re-baselining of giga-project economics.

Outlook

AlUla is the most architecturally and curatorially ambitious of Saudi Arabia’s heritage tourism projects, and the most operationally proven. Hegra, Habitas, Banyan Tree, Maraya and the Old Town are real and trading. The forward pipeline includes a credible mix of luxury and cultural anchors with named operators and contracted developers. The expanded airport gives the destination commercial viability, even before a second terminal.

The principal risks are three. First, the asset-build timeline is heavily back-loaded, with Sharaan Resort, the Aman cluster, Wadi AlFann’s permanent installation and the Kingdoms Institute concentrated in the 2026-2030 window. Slippage on any anchor would weaken the integrated draw the masterplan depends on. Second, the visitor curve from 300,000 today to 2 million by 2035 implies an annual growth rate above 20 percent compounded for a decade, achievable but not automatic, and dependent on direct international air capacity that is not yet contracted. Third, the destination is structurally more expensive to build and run than peer Saudi tourism plays because of its remote location, conservation constraints and dependence on imported labour and materials, which is why the pivot to private capital announced in 2025 matters for the cost-of-completion picture.

Set against those risks is a destination with a defensible UNESCO-anchored unique selling proposition, an unusually capable royal commission, a stable Franco-Saudi partnership, and a low-volume strategic model that aligns yield with conservation. Within the Vision 2030 cultural and tourism portfolio, AlUla is the asset most likely to become a globally recognised brand on its own terms, in much the way Petra functions for Jordan or Angkor for Cambodia, distinct from but reinforcing the wider Saudi tourism story being built at the Red Sea, Diriyah and Qiddiya.

Key Facts

Related

• Hegra
• Diriyah Gate
• Red Sea
• Qiddiya
• NEOM
• Vision 2030
• Public Investment Fund
• Ministry of Tourism
• Saudi Tourism Authority
• Tourism Saudi Arabia 2025
• How to Invest in Tourism Saudi Arabia
• Ministry of Culture

External References

• Royal Commission for AlUla — official site
• Experience AlUla — visitor portal
• Journey Through Time Masterplan
• AFALULA — French Agency for AlUla Development
• Skift — AlUla sustainable tourism strategy
• Reuters NEXT — AlUla USD 1.6 billion investor offer