Saudi Arabia is writing its tourism rulebook in public

For most of the last fifty years, visiting Saudi Arabia meant a pilgrimage visa, a business invitation, or nothing at all. The tourist e-visa launched in late 2019, and the country has since gone from a standing start to two-figure hotel pipelines in a handful of governorates.

The clearest expression of this is AlUla, in the northwest. Hegra — 111 Nabataean tombs carved from sandstone outcrops by the same civilisation that built Petra — was inscribed by UNESCO in 2008 and saw almost no visitors for a decade. It now has timed entry, a rawi guide programme staffed largely by people from the surrounding oases, and a policy of capping daily numbers rather than maximising them.

That cap is the interesting part. Most emerging destinations chase volume first and manage it later; AlUla's plan sets a visitor ceiling and builds hotel supply beneath it. Whether the ceiling survives contact with commercial pressure is the open question every planner in the region is watching.

Jeddah's Al-Balad is the counterweight. The old town's coral-block houses, with their latticed rawashin balconies, were being lost at a rate of several buildings a year. A restoration programme has stabilised dozens of them, and the pace of visible change on any single street is now measured in months rather than decades.

For travellers, the practical picture is simpler than the headlines suggest. The e-visa is straightforward for around sixty nationalities. Alcohol remains prohibited. Dress codes have relaxed — abayas are no longer required for foreign women — but modest dress is expected everywhere, and rather more so outside Riyadh and Jeddah.

What is genuinely rare is the quiet. Standing in front of Qasr al-Farid at nine in the morning with perhaps a dozen other people is an experience Petra has not offered since the 1980s. That will not last indefinitely, which is both the argument for going now and the reason to go carefully.