Macron appeals to MBS for bigger slice of Saudi industrial pie

From Riyadh to AlUla, French President Emmanuel Macron is trying to carve out a bigger role for his country as a partner in Saudi Arabia’s economic overhaul.

Following talks in the Saudi capital with Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman and an array of government officials and corporate executives, Macron was scheduled to meet Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman for dinner on Wednesday in the ancient desert city.

“We want to partner with you, meaning we want to create jobs here,” Macron told a Saudi-French business forum on Tuesday. “We want to be a partner of your vision and the vision of the Crown Prince for 2030.”

The two countries have signed a flurry of business deals during Macron’s visit, including contracts for the construction of three solar parks by French companies TotalEnergies and EDF Renewables in tandem with China’s SPIC Huanghe Hydropower Development Co.

Saudi investment in heritage tourism is starting to pay off

Across Saudi Arabia, ancient sites filled with the remnants of mud-brick imperial palaces and rocky Nabatean tombs are coming back to life.

From Riyadh’s Diriyah royal district and storied Red Sea port of Jeddah to the desert region of AlUla, the kingdom is spending lavishly to uncover its buried past and use it as a draw for both foreign and domestic tourists.

The dusty Jax industrial area on the outskirts of the Saudi capital, for example, has been transformed into a creative district crowned by the new Saudi Museum of Contemporary Art, or SAMoCA. Doors opened this week at teamLab Borderless Jeddah, the country’s first digital art museum, which sits in Jeddah’s historic Al-Balad neighborhood.

“Just like the preservation of the environment, it is crucial to preserve culture,” Fahd Hamidaddin, CEO of the Saudi Tourism Authority, said during a media roundtable discussion last month at the Arabian Travel Market conference in Dubai. “We are trying our best to make big bets on how much we can do that.”

Among the kingdom’s biggest bets so far is ancient AlUla, in which the government has poured billions to turn the site into a magnet for hikers, history buffs, art lovers and luxury travelers. In January, the Royal Commission for AlUla set up its own pavilion on the snowy main street of Davos, suiting up financiers at the World Economic Forum (WEF) with 3D goggles for an immersive virtual tour of the arid terrain.

“We are aiming to uphold the traditions and heritage of what AlUla has stood for across millennia,” Melanie de Souza, the commission’s Executive Director of Destination Marketing, told The Circuit at the Dubai travel conference. “We believe we have a responsibility to be preserving that heritage and telling a deep and rich story about it.” 

Visitors can explore AlUla through guided excursions that show off the ancient rock formations and archaeological wonders of the Nabateans, who ruled northern Arabia and the southern Levant between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC. Accommodations range from mid-market hotels to new five-star resorts such as the Caravan by Habitas AlUla and the Banyan Tree AlUla.

Both hotels have been built according to environmentally sustainable principles and evoke ancient Nabatean architecture in their design. Guests are greeted by professional  guides known as “rawis,” who are trained to help visitors understand AlUla’s history. The commission expects to create 40,000 new jobs over the next decade in AlUla, where unemployment runs high.

Last year, AlUla’s mirror-walled Maraya Concert Hall was the site of a three-month exhibition dedicated to American pop artist Andy Warhol that included his signature portraits of Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan and Elizabeth Taylor.

Now the area’s new Al Jadidah Arts District offers several new spaces for contemporary art and design, including Athr and Design Space AlUla. Meanwhile, a range of casual and high-end restaurants have introduced dishes derived from the ancient Nabateans and their desert landscape.

Over the last five years since Saudi Arabia first introduced online visas for international visitors, tourism has grown dramatically. More than 100 million visitors entered the kingdom in 2023, a 56% increase from 2019.

The investment in heritage sites across Saudi Arabia also appears to be paying off. Close to 92% of AlUla visitors visit archeological sites or engage in other heritage-related activities, according to the commission, and ticket transactions for heritage experiences increased by 30% in 2023. Saudi Tourism Minister Ahmed Al Khateeb said at the WEF’s Riyadh summit in April that the kingdom’s tourism sector expects to rake in $80 billion in 2024 while introducing foreign travelers to Saudi culture.

“You get the best experience, and you know more about other people’s culture and other nations’ cultures when you deal and interact with locals,” Al-Khateeb said at the conference. “We want to make sure that our guests are served by local people.”

In Jeddah, three historic properties in Al-Balad – Beit Jokhdar, Beit Al Rayess and Beit Kedwan– are being restored as “heritage hotels.” The project is part of $20 billion Jeddah Central Project that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced in 2020 that is rehabilitating some 5.7 million square meters of the city’s historic waterfront. 

“For us, tourism is way more than just another economic sector,” Hamidaddin said. “It has allowed us to have a voice that brings the world’s attention to Saudi.”

How an ancient region in Saudi Arabia is being reborn as a hub for culture and tourism

It was long one of Saudi Arabia’s best-kept secrets — even among Saudis themselves — the ancient region of AlUla, known only to those living in its proximity and a few archaeologists and scholars. 

Situated in the Hijaz region in the northwest part of the kingdom, the AlUla Valley is home to two millennia of history that, until recently, was one of the great forgotten treasures of antiquity. From around the fourth century BCE to the first century CE,, the Nabataeans, a settled tribe of nomads and merchants created a flourishing kingdom in both Petra, Jordan, and Hegra, AlUla’s ancient city. The AlUla Valley and Hegra, now a UNESCO Heritage site, served as a vital place for trade and commerce, developed along the ancient incense and spice road — one of the most important trading routes in the Arab world — running north to south along the west side of the Arabian Peninsula, linking Arabia and India to the Levant, Egypt and the Mediterranean.

In his 1888 work Travels in Arabia Deserta, British poet and explorer Charles Montagu Doughty, who was one of the few foreigners who traveled to the region at the end of the 19th century, offered a vivid glimpse of the desert region and its striking rock formations. “Little remains of the old civil generations of el-Héjr, the caravan city; her clay-built streets are again the blown dust in the wilderness. Their story is written for us only in the crabbed scrawlings upon many a wild crag of this sinister neighbourhood, and in the engraved titles of their funeral monuments, now solitary rocks, which the fearful passenger admires, in these desolate mountains.” 

Access to this once-forgotten region changed when Saudi Arabia opened to international leisure travelers in September 2019, granting tourist visas to the country, which for years was closed off to visitors. Today, thanks to social media and numerous marketing campaigns, it is hard not to have become familiar with AlUla’s curvaceous sand dunes, anamorphous red rock structures, famous “Elephant Rock” — a gigantic rock formation in the shape of an elephant, where visitors can watch an unforgettable sunset, the 110 remarkably well-preserved tombs set into the rock formations with their ancient architectural structures featuring elaborate facades cut out of the sandstone outcrops surrounding AlUla’s walled urban settlement —akin to those found also in Petra. Now, a host of contemporary art projects, such as Desert X, featuring a land art exhibition every two years, and Maraya, a mirror-covered concert hall (also the largest mirrored building on earth, according to Guinness World Records) hosting such stars as Andrea Boccelli and, most recently, Alicia Keys, among many other attractions.

(Courtesy: AlUla)

The AlUla Project, as it has been dubbed, is a plan to transform this ancient region into a global tourist experience under the direction of the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), a Saudi government body established in July 2017 to preserve and develop AlUla. It is also a cornerstone of Vision 2030, a strategic framework to transform the Gulf nation economically and socially, open itself to the world and wean its dependence off crude oil. RCU will contribute SAR 120bn in growth to the kingdom’s GDP by 2035 through its various development projects, much of which will be invested into the local AlUla economy. To achieve this, RCU has engaged the local AlUla community in its various projects through the Hammayah Program, in which 2,500 residents train to be advocates for AlUla’s natural and human heritage. 

“The tourism sector is key to the kingdom’s Saudi Vision 2030, as one of the tributaries of diversifying sources of income,” Philip Jones, chief destination marketing officer at The Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), told The Circuit. “The kingdom is creating a series of world-leading regions for tourism, from the Red Sea to Neom and beyond. AlUla has the advantage of being the first of the major infrastructure projects to welcome visitors and is already giving back to the economy. The Journey Through Time (JTT) masterplan was initiated by the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), outlining the ambitious plans for five districts and 15 cultural assets, 38,000 new jobs and 2 million visitors per year.” 

In October 2020, AlUla reopened its doors to visitors as a year-round destination, offering its four key heritage sites for visitors to access, including Hegra, Saudi Arabia’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site; Dadan, one of the most developed first-millennium BCE cities of the Arabian Peninsula; Jabal Ikmah, often referred to as the “open-air Library,” offering insights to ancient beliefs, rituals and practices of everyday life. 

The fourth site is AlUla Old Town, which opened early in 2021 for the first time to visitors, and is quickly transforming into a new hub for art and culture in the kingdom; it houses contemporary galleries such as Athr Gallery, one of Saudi Arabia’s foremost art galleries, and the Design Gallery, opening in the Art Square located in AlJadidah, a new vibrant hub for restaurants and shops centered around five distinct squares — Art Square, Gathering Square, Muayada Square, Oasis Square and Qanat Square — each with its own unique atmosphere. It is located on the edge of AlUla Oasis and overlooks AlUla Old Town, itself the site of a refurbished Incense Road market hosting several local retailers, cafes and restaurants as well as Sigg Art Residency Program, the first privately run art residency in AlUla founded by Swiss art collector and longtime Saudi resident Pierre Sigg. 

While the lure of discovering ancient desert lands and archaeological attractions as well as contemporary art and culture are central to the AlUla Project’s vision, the goal of the effort is also to transform the ancient region into a primary luxury destination in Saudi Arabia. The region, which is 22,500 square kilometers (9,000 square miles), approximately the same size as New Jersey, is now home to five-star accommodations, including the Habitas, a trailblazer in sustainable hospitality, located just five minutes away from the Desert X site, which opened in late November 2021. Nearby is Caravan by Habitas, where guests can stay in a luxury Airstream. Future hotels include Aman Resorts, which is opening three new properties in AlUla in 2023: an upscale tented camp, a resort inspired by local architecture and a ranch-style desert resort. A Banyan Tree resort will also open in the fourth quarter of 2022 in AlUla’s Ashar Valley. 

“AlUla’s positioning allows it to attract and host high-spending individuals from around the world and the kingdom itself and be a key generator for the kingdom’s tourism-related revenue,” added Jones. 

(Courtesy: AlUla)

While AlUla is rapidly transforming into one of the Middle East’s most sought-after travel destinations, its development is being done with utmost care — with a focus given to preserving the local traditions of the AlUla community and assisting the town to develop economically. In April 2021, RCU unveiled a $15bn opportunity for public-private partnerships. By 2035, the wider development strategy for the region is to create 38,000 jobs. 

“Our plans in AlUla are all about giving back to the community and creating jobs and opportunities, and we are already delivering on that and will continue to do so as we cement our permanent and seasonal events and attractions,” added Jones. 

The goal of attracting 2 million visitors to the AlUla area by 2035 is actually a modest one  — a controlled number for such a large land area. Officials don’t want the region to become a mass tourism hub but one tailored to a preservation of the land and local culture, and one in which the ancient idea of AlUla as a crossroads for business and culture is reborn.