Mada'in Saleh

Where it sits. Hegra — also written Hijr, and long known in Arabic as Mada'in Salih — lies in the AlUla valley of northwestern Saudi Arabia, in Medina Province, about 22 kilometres north of the town of AlUla and roughly 400 kilometres north of Medina. The setting is a broad sandy basin scattered with isolated sandstone outcrops, weathered into domes and fins by wind, standing free of one another on flat ground. That geology is the whole reason for the site's appearance: each tomb was cut into the vertical face of a separate rock, so the monuments read as sculptures in an open plain rather than as a cliff of facades. In 2008 Hegra became Saudi Arabia's first UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Petra's southern city. Hegra was the second city of the Nabataean kingdom, established as its southern capital on the incense road that carried frankincense and myrrh north from Yemen and Oman toward the Mediterranean. The surviving monuments date largely to the first century BC and the first century AD, the same window that produced the great facades at Petra, and the masons were working within the same architectural language: crow-step crenellations, engaged pilasters, urn finials, doorways framed by pediments. There are 111 monumental rock-cut tombs, 94 of them with carved facades, spread across a series of outcrops along with residential remains, some 130 wells and a hydraulic system. Rome annexed the kingdom in AD 106, and Hegra became the southeastern frontier of the province of Arabia; a Latin inscription recording the garrison of Legio III Cyrenaica in the 170s AD shows how far south imperial administration reached.

Why archaeologists rate it above Petra in one respect. Petra's tombs are almost entirely anonymous. Hegra's are not. Many of its facades carry inscriptions above the door naming the owner, sometimes the mason, the date by regnal year, and the legal penalties for anyone who reused the tomb without permission — fines payable to the king and to the temple. That makes Hegra a rare corpus of dated, attributed Nabataean funerary architecture, letting the stylistic sequence be pinned to actual years across roughly seven decades. Qasr al-Farid, the Lonely Castle, is the emblem: a four-storey facade carved into a single isolated boulder and abandoned unfinished, so that the top is polished and the bottom still shows the rough chisel work of masons cutting downward. Jabal Ithlib, at the northeastern end, holds the Diwan, a rock-cut chamber with benches used for ritual banqueting, and a narrow siq beside it lined with votive niches.

On screen. AlUla has become Saudi Arabia's production hub, and the film history here is very recent. Kandahar (2023), directed by Ric Roman Waugh with Gerard Butler, was the first big-budget American feature to shoot in the kingdom, working in AlUla and Jeddah between December 2021 and January 2022 and using the surrounding desert and canyons for scenes set in Afghanistan and Iran. Rupert Wyatt's historical epic Desert Warrior worked in the same valleys, and Tawfik Alzaidi's Norah (2024), the first Saudi feature selected for Un Certain Regard at Cannes, was shot in and around AlUla. The important qualification is that the archaeological zone of Hegra itself is protected and productions work in the wider valley rather than among the tombs — travellers looking for a film location will find AlUla's canyons, not this site, on the call sheets. The site's own visual signature is instead built around the Maraya concert hall, a mirror-clad cube in the Ashar valley that reflects the cliffs and is recognised as the largest mirrored building anywhere.

Visiting. Hegra reopened to visitors in October 2020 after decades of near-total inaccessibility, and access is controlled: entry is by guided tour only, booked through the Royal Commission for AlUla, with visitors carried between the tomb clusters in vintage-styled buses or open vehicles and accompanied by a local guide known as a rawi. Tours run about two hours and stop at four or five outcrops, including Qasr al-Farid, Jabal AlBanat with its cluster of tombs and Jabal Ithlib. Entering the tombs is not generally permitted. The pace suits photography poorly at midday; early and late slots put low sun on the facades.

Getting there and timing. AlUla has its own international airport with domestic connections from Riyadh and Jeddah and seasonal flights from Dubai and Europe; the drive from Medina takes about three and a half hours on good road. Accommodation ranges from desert camps in the Ashar valley to the restored mudbrick lanes of AlUla Old Town. The season runs roughly October to April and coincides with the AlUla arts programme, including the Desert X exhibitions installed among the rocks. Sand and uneven ground limit wheelchair access to the vehicle stops and viewing areas.