Saudi Arabia

Arabia was a land of Bedouin tribes, oasis towns, and the Red Sea trade and pilgrimage routes when, in 1744, the emir of Diriyah, Muhammad ibn Saud, allied with the revivalist preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Their movement expanded across the peninsula before Ottoman-Egyptian forces destroyed it in 1818; a second Saudi state rose and fell in the nineteenth century. The current kingdom was built by Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, who retook Riyadh in 1902 and unified the Hejaz, with its holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the central Najd, and other regions into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.

The 1938 discovery of oil in the Eastern Province brought immense wealth and a close partnership with the United States. A cautious, oil-funded modernisation was shadowed by religious conservatism, sharpened after extremists seized the Grand Mosque in 1979, and the kingdom played a central role in the 1973 oil embargo and hosted US forces in the 1990–91 Gulf War. Fifteen of the nineteen 11 September hijackers, and Osama bin Laden, were Saudi.

Since 2015 the country has been ruled by King Salman and, in practice, his son Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose "Vision 2030" drive aims to diversify the economy away from oil and to open and liberalise society — women allowed to drive, the religious police curbed, cinemas and concerts permitted, a first-ever tourist visa, and vast "giga-projects". This has come alongside intensified political repression, including the 2018 murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and continued mass executions.

Saudi culture is Arab, tribal, and Islamic at its core, and the kingdom's identity is bound up with being the birthplace of Islam and the custodian of Mecca and Medina. Family, lineage, and the majlis — the reception room where hospitality means Arabic coffee with cardamom, dates, and endless refills — remain central.

National dress is near-universal: the white thobe and the ghutra or red-checked shemagh for men, and for women the abaya, now a choice for foreigners but still the norm. Older traditions endure — the ardah sword dance, camel racing and camel beauty pageants, falconry, and Nabati poetry — while a young, connected population has embraced, in just a few years, cinemas, concerts, mixed cafés, gaming, and a booming domestic events scene.

The tension between rapid social opening and a firmly closed political system defines the moment.

Saudi Arabia is young, wealthy, and overwhelmingly urban, its population concentrated in Riyadh, Jeddah, Mecca, Medina, and the Eastern Province cities. Around two in five residents are foreign workers — South Asian, Egyptian, Filipino, Yemeni, and others — who do much of the manual and service labour under a sponsorship system that has been partially reformed.

Citizens have long enjoyed generous state support — free health care and education, cheap fuel, and public-sector jobs — funded by oil, and a "Saudisation" policy now pushes nationals into private-sector roles. Vision 2030 has visibly changed daily life: women driving and working in shops and restaurants, entertainment districts, and a construction boom around the giga-projects.

Life still runs on the prayer times, though shops no longer all close for them, and on the extreme heat, which pushes activity to the evening for much of the year.

Saudi cooking varies by region but centres on rice, lamb and chicken, dates, and flatbread. The national dish is kabsa — spiced rice cooked with meat, tomato, and dried lime — with regional cousins such as mandi, cooked in a pit oven, and saleeg, a creamy rice porridge of the Hejaz. Jareesh (cracked wheat with meat), margoog and matazeez dough-and-vegetable stews, and grilled meats are everyday fare.

Breakfast might be ful stewed beans, shakshuka, or mashed banana and bread. Dates are eaten at every opportunity and offered to guests with coffee. Sweets include kunafa, basbousa, and luqaimat dumplings in date syrup, and the Ramadan sunset table is elaborate.

Fresh juices, laban, and a non-alcoholic apple-and-soda "Saudi champagne" stand in for alcohol, which is banned, and coffee — Arabic, Turkish, and imported café styles — is everywhere.

AlUla, in the northwest, is the flagship of Saudi tourism: Hegra, the kingdom's first UNESCO World Heritage Site, with over a hundred monumental Nabataean tombs carved into desert sandstone, along with the old mud-brick town, ancient inscription sites, the mirrored Maraya concert hall, and dramatic canyon and oasis scenery.

Riyadh has the restored mud-brick district of Diriyah, another World Heritage Site and the dynasty's birthplace, the National Museum, the Masmak fortress, and the Edge of the World cliff escarpment out in the desert. Jeddah's historic Al-Balad quarter, also a World Heritage Site, keeps coral-stone merchant houses with carved wooden screens, and the city is the gateway for the Hajj and Red Sea diving.

The southwest is a green surprise: the misty highland city of Abha, the terraced villages and stone tower-houses of Asir, and Farasan Island. The Empty Quarter, the largest continuous sand sea on Earth, is crossed on 4x4 expeditions. Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam, draw millions of pilgrims a year, but their central areas are closed to non-Muslims.