AlUla, Saudi Arabia

Perched on the roof of the world’s largest mirrored building, overlooking the rock-strewn canyons of the Ashar Valley, Maraya Social is the FACT award-winning best restaurant in AlUla — two years running — and the most dramatic dining venue in Saudi Arabia. Chef Jason Atherton’s menu blends Mediterranean sharing plates with Arabian and British influences: the oven-roasted red chicory, the garlic shrimp, and the baklava cheesecake are the three dishes most requested by returning guests. The zero-proof mocktail pairings are genuinely inventive. Arrive at golden hour when the sandstone canyon walls glow amber and the mirrors multiply the light in every direction.

The Michelin Bib Gourmand-recognised restaurant at Dar Tantora in AlUla’s Old Town is the most important kitchen in the city for understanding Saudi culinary identity: a menu built around classic dishes of the Hijaz region — kabsa, mandi, masoub, jareesh — modernised with a Spanish culinary touch using locally sourced ingredients from AlUla’s own farms. The dates waffle with syrup, the pumpkin flatbread, and the minced beef tenderloin are the breakfast and lunch anchors. The setting — a restored thousand-year-old mud-brick building — makes it the most historically embedded dining room in northwestern Saudi Arabia. The Bib Gourmand recognition is well-earned.

AlUla’s position in the remote desert of northwestern Saudi Arabia, 300 kilometers from the nearest city, makes it one of the premier astrotourism destinations on earth: on a clear winter night the Milky Way is visible as a solid band to the naked eye, and the complete absence of industrial light pollution means the full depth of the night sky — four thousand stars, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Pleiades cluster — is available without equipment. The guided evening combines professional stargazing with a Bedouin-prepared dinner of slow-cooked lamb, flatbread, and dates around a fire, connecting the contemporary desert visitor to the same sky the Nabataean astronomers used for navigation two thousand years ago.

Beautifully nestled in a restored mud-brick building in AlUla’s Old Town, Tawlat Fayza is named for a local woman who grew up in a Saudi farmhouse and whose childhood recipes form the menu’s backbone. The kitchen is built around the concept that at Fayza’s table there is always room for one more — the generosity of the traditional Saudi family meal as a dining philosophy. The handmade pumpkin ravioli in sage brown butter sauce, the flame-cooked meats, and the seasonal farm-to-fork vegetables sourced directly from AlUla’s date palm oasis are the signature offerings. The private rooftop, with panoramic views over the ancient mud-brick skyline toward the sandstone cliffs, is the finest intimate dining space in the Old Town.

Hidden in the Ashar Valley among colossal rose-red sandstone cliffs, this 47-villa tented camp is the most architecturally distinguished hotel in AlUla. Designed by AW2 architects, the sand-colored tent-villas are topped with bat-wing-shaped canopies that make them nearly invisible against the canyon walls — a deliberate act of camouflage that earns the description of “Star Wars landscape, Maldives luxury.” Each villa has its own private pool. The spa, the evening stargazing terraces, and the canyon landscape visible from every surface make it the most complete single-property experience available in northwestern Saudi Arabia.

A wellness-focused resort born at Burning Man and transplanted to the Ashar Valley: 96 tented villas arranged around a millennia-old oasis of palms, with a lobby designed as a khaima (traditional Bedouin tent) where Sadu carpets and Arabic coffee set the tone on arrival. The six programming pillars — music, wellness, adventure, culture, learning, and culinary — make it the most intellectually ambitious property in AlUla. The pool, the sound bath sessions, the evening fire pits, and the Tama restaurant are the four experiences most mentioned by returning guests. The setting, pressed between ancient sandstone walls and palms, earns its reputation.

Thirty ancient mud-brick houses in AlUla’s historic Old Town, meticulously restored by local craftsmen in collaboration with archaeologists using traditional building techniques: mud bricks, palm fronds, carved plaster, and the same materials that built the town a thousand years ago. This is the most historically embedded stay in AlUla — not a simulation of the old town, but actual occupation of its fabric. The JOONTOS restaurant, serving Michelin Bib Gourmand-recognised Saudi cuisine with a Spanish touch, operates from the ground floor. The rooftop terrace looks directly over the mud-brick skyline toward the sandstone cliffs. Named after the sundial that once told the agricultural seasons.

GHM Hotels’ most recent masterwork: a boutique collection of 35 rooms built directly into an existing complex of historic structures — an old Hejaz Railway station, the Hegra Fort, and surrounding stone buildings — 22 kilometers north of AlUla town and literally adjacent to the Hegra UNESCO site. The design philosophy is minimal intervention: the ancient architecture does the work, and the contemporary interiors exist in deliberate restraint. Three dining venues, a spa, a swimming pool, and the most extraordinary archaeological neighborhood available from any hotel room in Saudi Arabia. Falling asleep within sight of two-thousand-year-old Nabataean tombs is the experience this hotel was built to provide.

Saudi Arabia’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site and the southernmost capital of the Nabataean civilization — the same people who built Petra in Jordan, but whose AlUla tombs are larger, better preserved, and seen by a fraction of the visitors. The 111 monumental rock-cut tombs, carved between the first century BCE and the first century CE, are organized across eleven tomb groups in the desert. Qasr Al Farid — the “Lonely Castle,” a single massive tomb carved into an isolated outcrop and left unfinished — is the single most arresting image in all of northwestern Saudi Arabia. Tours depart six times daily. Book in advance: capacity is capped by UNESCO agreement.

Rising 52 meters from the desert floor, this colossal sandstone monolith has been sculpted by wind erosion over millions of years into the unmistakable silhouette of an elephant with a curved trunk — one of the most extraordinary natural formations in the Arab world. At golden hour, when the terracotta rock face catches the last horizontal light and a thin rim of orange appears along the elephant’s back against the blue sky, it is among the most beautiful photographic vistas in Saudi Arabia. The SALT restaurant at the base provides a perfect sunset viewing platform. On clear winter nights, the Milky Way is visible above it to the naked eye.

The Maraya — Arabic for “mirrors” — is a 9,740 square meter concert hall and cultural venue whose four sides are entirely clad in reflective glass, making it the largest mirrored structure on earth and a Guinness World Record holder. Built in the Ashar Valley, it reflects the surrounding sandstone canyon walls and desert sky in a constantly shifting visual that is both technologically astonishing and architecturally respectful of its landscape. The rooftop restaurant, Maraya Social — run by Michelin-starred chef Jason Atherton — offers the finest dining and the most otherworldly view available in AlUla. Sunset from the Maraya terrace, when the canyon walls glow and the mirrors catch the last light, is unmissable.

At dawn, drifting above the valley floor of AlUla in a hot air balloon is the only vantage point from which the full scale of the landscape — the mushroom rock formations, the Nabataean tombs, the Ashar Valley canyons, the ancient oasis of palm groves stretching green against the red desert floor — becomes simultaneously legible. At the precise moment the sun clears the eastern escarpment, the entire valley ignites in amber. The landscape below, which has absorbed this same light for three thousand years of human civilization, responds with the warm terracotta glow that makes AlUla one of the most photogenic places on earth.