AlUla and the Red Sea: Saudi Arabia's wager on regenerative luxury

The light leaves the plain first, then the rock. At Hegra, in north-west Saudi Arabia, the last of it settles on façades cut into sandstone two thousand years ago, their carved doorways opening onto chambers for the dead. UNESCO counts 111 monumental tombs here, 94 of them decorated, dating from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD ¹. The wells that once kept the town alive are, UNESCO notes, still in use ¹.

Some way to the west, the same evening falls on the coast near Al Wajh, over a lagoon of 2,081 km² that holds 92 islands, coral reefs, seagrass meadows and mangroves ¹⁸. On its beaches hawksbill and green turtles haul themselves ashore to nest; a 2022 survey by the coast's developer counted hundreds of their tracks ¹⁹.

Both landscapes now carry one of the largest tourism wagers any country has placed. Saudi Arabia reported 122 million domestic and international visits in 2025 and aims for 150 million a year by 2030 ²⁷. Two flagship destinations, AlUla and the Red Sea coast, are pitched at the top of the market: few guests, high spending, and a vocabulary that has moved from sustainability towards regeneration. This feature asks what each place holds, what has been promised, and how much of it anyone outside the projects has checked.

A valley written over many times

Hegra was inscribed in 2008, the first World Heritage property in Saudi Arabia ¹. UNESCO describes it as the largest conserved site of the Nabataean civilisation south of Petra, and as a witness to the international caravan trade of late Antiquity ¹. France's culture ministry places it on the incense caravan route that crossed the Arabian Peninsula; a French-Saudi mission at work there since 2002 has documented a walled town of some fifty hectares, more than 130 wells and a Roman military camp, found in 2015 at the empire's southern limit ⁴⁴.

Hegra is the best-known layer, not the oldest. UNESCO records some 50 pre-Nabataean inscriptions at the site, in scripts including Lihyanite and Thamudic ¹. Dadan was once the capital of the Dadan and Lihyan kingdoms and, according to the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), a hub of trade and agriculture on the incense route; its Lion Tombs, cut into red cliff faces, take their name from the seated lions carved beside them ³. Jabal Ikmah, visited on the same tours ³, carries more than 300 inscriptions, most from the second half of the first millennium BC, many in the local Dadanitic alphabet. The RCU announced in May 2023 that it had been listed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, and calls it "an open-air library" ⁴.

AlUla Old Town, a tight weave of stone and mud-brick houses thought to date from the 12th century, was lived in until the 1980s, when the last residents left for modern housing; the RCU closed it in 2017 for conservation and reopened it to visitors in 2021 ⁴⁵.

What makes the valley unusual is less any single monument than the stacking of eras: ancient kingdoms, a Roman frontier and a medieval town, each written over the last. The RCU's masterplan treats its 20 km historical core as five districts, from the Old Town to Hegra ²; our AlUla profile and our feature on heritage at landscape scale follow how that is governed.

Canyons, reserves and the leopard's long road back

Beyond the archaeology lie canyons and valleys; Sharaan Nature Reserve covers about 1,540 km² of them ⁶. In January 2025 it was admitted to the IUCN Green List, the union's certification for protected areas that are effectively managed and fairly governed; IUCN described it as AlUla County's first fully protected area and "a vital first step" towards restoring landscapes, habitats and wildlife ⁵⁶.

Restoration has begun with the animals the predators need. In February 2023 the RCU's executive director for wildlife and natural heritage, Stephen Browne, told Arab News that 650 Arabian gazelles, 550 sand gazelles, 280 Arabian oryx and 100 Nubian ibex would have been released by the end of that winter into Sharaan, Wadi Nakhlah and Al-Gharameel, three of six designated reserves covering more than 12,400 km² ⁷. The emblem of the effort is the Arabian leopard, which the RCU says is critically endangered in the wild, with no accurate count of the animals that remain ⁸. Its breeding centre in Taif recorded six cubs in 2025 ⁸. Browne said a return to AlUla could come "as soon as 2030" ⁷. No release into the wild has yet been documented.

A sea that runs hot

Red Sea corals have become a subject of scientific hope. In 2013 researchers reported "an exceptionally high bleaching threshold" in corals of the northern Red Sea, and argued that the Gulf of Aqaba might act as a reef refuge, with bleaching delayed there by at least a century ¹². Further south the picture is harsher. After water temperatures reached 32.5°C in 2015, surveys of eleven reefs in the central Saudi Red Sea found that, on inshore reefs, 55.6% of live coral cover had bleached ¹³. The Al Wajh lagoon lies on the coast between those two study areas. Heat tolerance in the Red Sea is a gradient, not a guarantee.

A 2020 planning study recorded about 84 km² of dense coral, 15.9 km² of dense mangroves and 8.6 km² of dense seagrass, and modelled two sea turtles, the hawksbill and the green, and eleven bird species, among them the sooty falcon, the crab plover and the white-eyed gull ¹⁸. Red Sea Global's 2022 survey of 250 km of coast counted 251 hawksbill and 613 green turtle nesting tracks at its Red Sea destination, and 193 fish species in surveys at AMAALA further north ¹⁹. One of its scientists reported a coral colony more than eight metres tall and several hundred years old, and endangered whale and zebra sharks ²⁰. Dugongs appear in the planning study only as bycatch casualties ¹⁸, and the survey reports we read give no counts for them ¹⁹²⁰: the most charismatic species are not always the best documented.

What the state has promised

The national frame is Vision 2030. Its original goal of 100 million annual visits was passed in 2023, with more than 106 million, and the Ministry of Tourism raised the target to 150 million by 2030 ²⁶. The National Tourism Development Strategy aims to lift tourism's direct contribution to GDP from 3% to 10%; the Ministry of Tourism writes the rules, while the Saudi Tourism Authority markets the country, which opened to tourist visas on 27 September 2019 ²⁸. On the environmental side, the Saudi Green Initiative commits the kingdom to protecting 30% of its land and sea by 2030, up from 16.9% under protection in 2021 ²⁹.

In AlUla, the RCU's Journey Through Time masterplan of April 2021 set targets for 2035: two million visitors a year, fifteen new cultural assets and the designation of 80% of the county as nature reserves ². The reported results are smaller and first-party. More than 240,000 people had visited by the third quarter of 2025, spending about SAR 2,100 each against a SAR 1,400 target, according to the national budget statement ¹¹; Skift reported 320,000 visitors for 2025 as a whole, up 15% ⁹. The ceiling has been lowered. In October 2025 Semafor reported that the RCU planned to keep visitor numbers to no more than one million a year by 2030; its chief tourism officer, Phillip Jones, said: "We don't ever want to be a mass tourism destination" ¹⁰. In June 2026 he put capacity at about 1,000 keys in seven hotels, rising to nearly 3,000 by 2030 ⁹.

On the coast, the developer is Red Sea Global (RSG), a company of the Public Investment Fund ⁴³. It was created as The Red Sea Development Company and rebranded in October 2022, with a mandate extended to more than ten projects along the coast ²⁵. Its two main destinations make large, specific promises:

• The Red Sea: 28,000 km² including more than 90 islands, with development limited to less than 1% of the area and visitor numbers capped at one million a year; RSG calls it "the world's largest destination powered entirely by off-grid renewable energy" ¹⁴.
• AMAALA: 4,200 km² further north, positioned around wellness, art and marine life, with nine hotels of about 1,600 keys and development limited to less than 5% of its area ¹⁵.
• Across both: a 30% net conservation gain by 2040 ¹⁶, and 50 million mangroves planted by 2030, from a nursery opened in 2023 ²¹.

Scale figures move with the source. RSG's own page describes 18 hotels and about 3,000 keys at The Red Sea ¹⁴; AGBI, which tracks the project, reports a goal of 50 resorts and about 8,000 rooms by 2030 across 22 islands and inland sites ²³; and the Public Investment Fund lists more than 40 hotels and 12,000 rooms across RSG's destinations ²⁴. They may describe different scopes or phases; the public record does not say.

A peer-reviewed paper set out the case in 2020. Using marine spatial planning, its authors designated nine islands to be set aside from development, zoned 58% of the lagoon's marine area for conservation, and estimated that existing pressures, without intervention, would cost about 10% of the lagoon's conservation value over twenty years ¹⁸. They concluded:

"careful design and planning could potentially allow coastal development to enhance, rather than jeopardize, conservation" ¹⁸

The same paper called the coral-reef and habitat goals "exceptionally ambitious and challenging", and several of its authors were the developer's own executives ¹⁸.

NEOM, in brief

Further north, in Tabuk Province, NEOM is the kingdom's most ambitious and most contested project. Its first destination, the island resort of Sindalah, opened in October 2024 ³⁷. Its flagship has shrunk: Bloomberg reported in 2024 that officials expected just 2.4 km of The Line to be complete by 2030, housing fewer than 300,000 people rather than the 1.5 million once planned ³⁵, and in January 2026 the 2029 Asian Winter Games at Trojena were postponed ³⁶.

The human cost has been documented by rights groups. Human Rights Watch reports that the authorities forcibly evicted members of the Huwaitat tribe from the NEOM area, that one protesting resident was killed, and that two residents received 50-year prison terms and three were sentenced to death for resisting the evictions ³¹. ALQST names the resident killed as Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, shot dead by security forces in April 2020, and reports that the death sentences were upheld on appeal in January 2023 ³⁰. In 2024 Colonel Rabih Alenezi, a Saudi officer now living in the UK, told the BBC he had been authorised to use lethal force against villagers who refused to leave; the BBC said it could not independently verify his account ³³. Replying to UN experts in 2023, Saudi Arabia said forced eviction was not practised in NEOM, that 1,143 families (6,360 people) had been relocated and fully compensated, and that the three men had been convicted of terrorism offences ³⁴. Human Rights Watch has also documented abuses of migrant workers on PIF giga-projects, naming NEOM; its report does not name AlUla or RSG ³². None of these disputes has been settled by an independent inquiry.

Where the guest sleeps

Hotels are where most visitors meet these promises, and their public statements vary widely in what a reader can check. We cite them as illustrations, not recommendations.

In AlUla's Ashar Valley, Banyan Tree AlUla offers villas under tent canopies about 16 km from Hegra, and speaks of its passion for sustainability and of ingredients from AlUla's farms; its page publishes no environmental data ³⁸. Habitas AlUla, in the same valley, describes itself as a "sustainable home of wonder" and cooks with produce from local farms, again without certifications or figures on the page ³⁹.

On the coast, Six Senses Southern Dunes, The Red Sea, which welcomed the destination's first guests in 2023 ¹⁴, goes further. It says it was the first resort in the kingdom to achieve both LEED Platinum and GSTC certification, and that it runs on renewable electricity from a dedicated solar farm of 11,228 panels, which produced 11,997,380 kWh in 2024 ⁴⁰. The St. Regis Red Sea Resort, 90 villas by Kengo Kuma on Ummahat Island, says it was developed in accordance with LEED Platinum standards and that more than 190,000 mangroves have been planted on the island with RSG's support ⁴¹. Nujuma, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve, on the same archipelago, reports LEED Platinum certification and says it protects turtle and osprey nesting sites; it publishes no measured results for energy, water or nature ⁴².

The distinction matters. A building certificate verifies how a hotel was built; a management certificate verifies how it is run. Neither, on its own, shows that a reef, a valley or a village is better off.

Target, measured, verified

On the evidence scale we use across this site:

• Verified. Hegra's value, assessed by UNESCO at inscription in 2008 ¹. Sharaan's management and governance, assessed for the IUCN Green List in 2025 ⁵. The science of Red Sea coral heat tolerance, and its limits, in peer-reviewed journals ¹²¹³.
• Documented. AlUla's visitor numbers and spending ⁹¹¹; RSG's turtle nesting counts ¹⁹; its 230,000-plus corals rescued or relocated ¹⁶; Six Senses Southern Dunes' solar output ⁴⁰. All are published by the operators or the state, with data, but none has been independently audited in public.
• In progress. Leopard breeding in Taif ⁸; mangrove planting, with one million seedlings reported planted in 2023 ²².
• Announced. RSG's SIIG model (Survey, Identify, Intervene, Gain), built on a 2022–2023 ecological baseline and described as delivering "verifiable" outcomes, though the page names no verifier ¹⁷. Visitor caps of one million a year in both places ¹⁰¹⁴.
• Aspiration. A 30% net conservation gain by 2040 ¹⁶; 80% of AlUla as nature reserves by 2035 ²; 30% of the kingdom protected by 2030 ²⁹; a leopard in the wild by 2030 ⁷.

Two gaps stand out. RSG says it tracks progress transparently, but its sustainability page mentions no third-party audit of the figures, and its "30+ sustainability accreditations" are not named ¹⁶. The 2020 planning paper, though peer-reviewed, verifies a method rather than an outcome, with monitoring by the developer's own teams ¹⁸. In AlUla, we found no independent, published evaluation of the masterplan's effect on residents. The most robust markers in either place remain a UNESCO inscription and an IUCN listing.

Why ultra-luxury needs proof

Both destinations have made the same strategic choice: fewer guests, each spending more. In AlUla, Semafor reported international visitors spending about $1,000 a day, and Jones said the destination had received 400 private planes the previous year ¹⁰. A visitor cap is a promise of scarcity, and scarcity is what the top of the market buys. As our analysis of luxury and ultra-luxury argues, fewer and wealthier guests can mean more value per visitor and a heavier footprint per stay; which one a place gets depends on ownership and policy.

That is why proof matters more here, not less. When a whole coastline or county is developed by one state-backed body, the usual checks, from competing operators to local councils and independent media, can be thinner. What can stand in for them is verification: a baseline published before construction, outcomes measured against it, an independent auditor who signs the result, and a public record that includes what went wrong. That is what we mean by verified regenerative luxury, and the same applies to ultra-luxury, where the claims are larger and the guests fewer. Our explainer on what regenerative luxury is sets out the definition; Four houses, on the record shows how far even the best-known ultra-luxury groups are from publishing portfolio-wide results; and how destinations fund regeneration asks who pays for reserves and reefs once the opening budgets are spent.

The test has already been put from inside Saudi Arabia. In his piece for this edition, the Jeddah-based auditor Mujtaba Ali Hashmi asks for three things: a published baseline, independent verification and a fair share of value for local people. On the first, Red Sea Global has published a model and says it rests on a 2022–2023 baseline study ¹⁷. The second and third tests are still open, and the rights questions around NEOM show what is at stake when they are not met.

The Nabataeans left no sustainability report. They left wells that, two thousand years on, are still in use ¹. Saudi Arabia's new destinations have set themselves targets of 2030, 2035 and 2040. The proof will come from whoever is allowed to check.