This is not a mirage

If we had a magic carpet and could leap off this cliff edge, then fly along the canyon, there are other things we would see, too. Wonders such as 2,000-year-old sandstone temples carved out of the rock, standing like abandoned ships in the desert. We’d see more ancient ruins ‒ wells, temples and crumbling walls, with square rock tombs carved into the cliff face hundreds of feet above.

Then we would fly into another valley and see even more extraordinary sites: a waterfall of gold, a metallic flowercum-star that reflects all the colours of the desert, a maze of magical frames and trampolines. And we would see a building that appears to be something else entirely: a huge cube of mirrored glass set within the ancient rocks.

We would then float down to street level and observe a scene that is, in its own way, just as remarkable ‒ a social revolution. Men and women, segregated and kept apart for years, are now mingling and talking to each other. Women are allowed to show their hair and express their individuality. Artists are free to represent all of this in photographs, murals and sculpture.

We are in a place called AlUla. Let’s list some adjectives that first come to mind that sum up the feeling of being here. They are: heady, thrilled, privileged and surprised. There are a few reasons for feeling surprised: principally, we are in Saudi Arabia.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has not been open long. ‘Open’ means a number of things. From the early 1980s the country adopted a policy of religious conservatism that restricted both how people behaved within the country and how many visitors could arrive from outside.

In the autumn of 2019, its leaders unveiled a new e-visa system that made the country as easy to visit as, well, almost anywhere. And once you are there, be prepared to have your preconceptions challenged. This new openness — the social changes, the upsurge in cultural activity ‒ is happening at a speed that, if not unprecedented, is pretty rare in the modern world.

Yet Saudi Arabia is a place where the image lags far, far behind the reality of daily life. In the meantime, we can visit places like AlUla. Take this next sentence with a pinch of desert salt, if you like. I’ve been writing about travel for 25 years and this place is right up there with the great wonders. Instagrammable? It’d break Instagram if the influencers ever get here in seriously large numbers.

Let’s explain what we saw on our magic carpet ride. AlUla is a fertile desert valley in the north-west of Saudi Arabia, about 500 miles north of Jeddah. The first civilisation to settle here were the Dadanites (sometimes called the Lihyanites). They farmed, traded and worshipped here for a long time: seven centuries. It was their crumbling walls and rock tombs we saw earlier.

I spent an enjoyable couple of hours picking around the Dadan ruins with Jonathan Wilson, collections manager at the Royal Commission for AlUla. Wilson learnt his trade back in the UK in places such as the Black Country Museum near Birmingham and the Plymouth City Art Gallery. As a helicopter lands and a group of VIPs in white robes and keffiyehs cluster on the other side of the ruins, we agree this is a bit different from Dudley and Devon.

Wilson breezes through the centuries. The Nabateans from the northern rock city of Petra were jealous of the Dadanites’ thriving trade in spices and frankincense (at the time of Christ’s birth): so they took them over. Off went the Nabateans into the desert and did what Nabateans did best: carve monumental structures in the soft sandstone, in this case for their departed kings and, notably, queens.

There are 111 tombs here in ancient Hegra, which has only been open to the outside world since late 2020, I feel I’m in the first bunch of tourists to encounter Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu. It is that spectacular. Then the Romans, too, got annoyed by the prosperity of this kingdom on their southern fringe. And after them, an era of decline and falling down.

As the Saudis built their new state in 1932, they ordained that history began in 570, with the birth of the prophet Mohammed. Dadan and Hegra were spared, but ignored. That has all now changed; Saudi schoolchildren are being taught pre-Islamic history.

The Black Arch was recently updated for an exhibition at AlUla’s Maraya concert and exhibition hall called What Lies Within. Of all the sites ancient and modern in AlUla, Maraya, by Florian Boje of Milan’s Giò Forma Group, is the most mesmerising. It is officially the largest mirrored building in the world. But the statistics (it is covered in 9,740 mirrored panels) don’t tell the full story.

At dawn, midday, dusk and night, Maraya reflects the changing colours and light of the desert. Sometimes the structure is dark, silvery and subdued, other times it reflects the landscape back at itself with the clarity of an Imax screen.

If, during those conservative years, Saudi contemporary artists were kept within, now they are most definitely out. While the houses in AlUla’s Old Town are less striking than Maraya, they are no less important to AlUla’s grand plan. Some are fine, square sandstone structures, others the kind of homes you might see in any out-of-the-way town in the Middle East.

Yet there is a radical transformation happening here, too, as abandoned buildings are turned into art galleries ‒ from permanent to pop-up ‒ while restaurants and boutiques line the pedestrianised streets. In an old girls’ school, students of all ages ‒ overwhelmingly women ‒ practise traditional and modern crafts, weaving, making ceramics and jewellery for sale in the old town.

The project, called the Madrasat AdDeera, is a partnership with The Prince’s Foundation, the Prince of Wales’s charity devoted to preserving and marketing traditional crafts.