AlUla

Hegra, a Nabataean city carved into sandstone cliffs by the same civilization behind Jordan's Petra, sat almost entirely closed to international visitors for decades, not because it lacked significance but because Saudi Arabia simply didn't issue tourist visas. That changed only in September 2019, when the country introduced a tourist visa for the first time, opening a site holding roughly 100 monumental rock-cut tombs to general international tourism for the first time in its modern history.

That late opening has kept Hegra genuinely uncrowded compared to Petra, despite sharing similar architectural style, elaborate facades carved directly into standing sandstone outcrops, and dating to a similar period of Nabataean influence across the ancient trade routes of Arabia. Saudi Arabia designated it the country's first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008, well before tourism access caught up with that recognition.

Visiting Hegra requires a guided tour rather than independent access, part of a deliberate, still-developing approach to visitor management as Saudi Arabia builds out tourism infrastructure across AlUla and the wider region. That structure has, so far, kept the site's most significant tombs in excellent condition and free of the kind of unmanaged foot traffic that's affected other, longer-open ancient sites.

Old Town AlUla, a labyrinth of mudbrick buildings that housed the area's population for centuries before being gradually abandoned in favor of modern construction nearby, offers a different, more recent layer of history, its narrow lanes and crumbling walls giving a direct sense of pre-modern Arabian desert urban life distinct from Hegra's ancient tombs.

AlUla's dramatic desert landscape, including formations like Elephant Rock, a naturally sculpted sandstone outcrop resembling its namesake, has become part of a broader Saudi push to position the region as a major new cultural and tourism destination, backed by significant government investment in resorts, infrastructure, and ongoing archaeological work. For travelers, that translates into a genuinely new destination, one where the tourism experience itself is still actively being built around sites that have existed for two thousand years.