AlUla: heritage at landscape scale, and the gap between plan and proof

Most World Heritage sites are managed as sites. In AlUla, in north-west Saudi Arabia, the state has chosen to manage a whole county of 22,561 km² ² as a single heritage, nature and tourism project, under one royal commission and one masterplan. That makes AlUla one of the largest experiments anywhere in heritage at landscape scale. It also makes it unusually important to separate what has been planned and announced from what has been measured, and to ask who is doing the measuring.

A commission for a county

The Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) was established by royal decree in July 2017 ⁴. Its board is chaired by the Crown Prince and Prime Minister, Mohammed bin Salman, and its mandate covers developmental plans to preserve the heritage of AlUla Governorate, with particular attention to tourism ²⁵. Leadership changed in January 2024, when Abeer AlAkel was appointed chief executive after her predecessor, Amr AlMadani, was arrested by the national anti-corruption authority over allegations involving contracts awarded to a company he partly owned ²¹.

The RCU is at once planner, regulator and developer. It closed AlUla Old Town in 2017 for restoration; the mud-brick settlement had been inhabited from the 12th century until the 1980s, when the last residents left for modern housing, and it reopened to visitors in 2021 ¹⁶. In December 2025 the commission lifted a suspension on land sales and property transactions in selected areas of central and southern AlUla, citing its second masterplan, Path to Prosperity, launched in August 2023 ²².

Hegra and the archaeology beneath the plan

The anchor is Hegra. Inscribed in 2008, it was the first World Heritage property in Saudi Arabia. UNESCO describes it as the largest conserved Nabataean site south of Petra, with 111 monumental tombs, 94 of them with decorated façades, dating from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD, and wells that show the Nabataeans' hydraulic skill ¹. At inscription UNESCO recommended systematic monitoring of the site's conservation and a presentation of its value for the benefit of visitors and of the region's population ¹.

A Saudi-French mission has worked at Hegra since 2002. According to France's culture ministry, it has documented a walled town of about 50 hectares, residential quarters of mostly unfired brick, more than 130 wells and a Roman military camp found in 2015 ¹⁴. The landscape scale is visible in prehistory too: an aerial survey by the University of Western Australia, funded by the RCU, recorded more than 1,000 mustatils, rectangular stone structures dated to about 5300–5000 BC, in work published in Antiquity ¹³.

The funding line matters. Much of the research that defines AlUla is commissioned or paid for by the body that is also developing it. That does not make it unreliable; the mustatil results passed peer review. It does mean that "independent" needs care here. An ESSEC Business School case study, for example, was written at the RCU's invitation and presents no critical assessment ²³.

The plan and its numbers

The Journey Through Time masterplan was launched on 7 April 2021 ³. It set out a 15-year programme in three phases to 2035, five districts along a 20 km historical core (AlUla Old Town, Dadan, Jabal Ikmah, Nabataean Horizon and Hegra Historical City), 15 new cultural assets, a Kingdoms Institute for archaeological research, a 46 km tram, and the designation of 80% of the county as nature reserves ²³. Its headline targets for 2035 were two million visitors a year, 38,000 new jobs, a population of 130,000 and a SAR 120 billion contribution to GDP ²³. Contemporary reports gave inconsistent hotel-room totals, so we do not repeat one. The RCU's then chief executive put the total budget at about $15 billion; the masterplan itself contained no funding details ¹⁵.

Targets versus results

The RCU's 2024 annual report sets a first-phase target of 250,000 visits a year and repeats the long-term aim of two million annual visits; its jobs figure is now 40,500. These are presented as strategic direction, not results ⁵.

The results that have been published are smaller and first-party. The RCU reported 286,000 visitors in 2024, 72% of them Saudi nationals ⁶. The 2026 national budget statement recorded more than 240,000 visitors by the third quarter of 2025, with average spending of about SAR 2,100 against a SAR 1,400 target ⁹. In June 2026 Skift reported 320,000 visitors for 2025, up 15% ⁷. That clears the first-phase threshold and is about a sixth of the 2035 figure.

The targets themselves have moved. In October 2025 Semafor reported that the RCU now aimed for no more than one million annual visitors by 2030; its chief tourism officer, Phillip Jones, said: "We don't ever want to be a mass tourism destination" ⁸. In June 2026 he put capacity at about 1,000 hotel keys across seven hotels, rising to nearly 3,000 by 2030, and said regional uncertainty had slowed some projects ⁷. We found no published data on progress towards the jobs or population targets.

Reserves, and the voices still missing

The nature component has the strongest independent marker. In January 2025 Sharaan Nature Reserve, about 1,540 km² of canyons and valleys, was admitted to the IUCN Green List, the union's standard for effectively managed and fairly governed protected areas; IUCN described it as AlUla County's first fully protected area ¹⁰²⁴. Wildlife work is further back. In February 2023 the RCU said 1,580 gazelles, oryx and ibex would have been released into three reserves by the end of that winter, and spoke of a possible return of the Arabian leopard "as soon as 2030" ¹¹. The RCU's breeding programme in Taif recorded six cubs in 2025 ¹²; no release into AlUla has been documented.

Residents' perspectives are thinner still. A 2021 master's dissertation that interviewed 16 people, mostly local business owners and managers, found tourism welcomed for jobs and income alongside concern about cultural erosion and excessive development ¹⁷. A 2019 Reuters report noted the belief, held by many Saudis, that the site is haunted, and that residents on a media tour steered the conversation away from it and towards business opportunities ¹⁸. In October 2024, announcing a partnership with the RCU, Slow Food said it had just established the first Slow Food Community in AlUla ⁴.

Outside critics frame the question differently. A 2026 essay in Finestre sull'Arte asked whether AlUla's cultural programme risks becoming "artwashing" and left the answer open ¹⁹; a 2024 commentary observed that dissenting voices are rarely heard in Saudi Arabia's development drive ²⁰. We found no independent, published evaluation of the masterplan's social outcomes. Until one exists, AlUla's ambitions are well documented and its achievements only partly so.