Jeddah was a walled city until 1947. The wall had been rebuilt in 1525 against a Portuguese threat, repaired through the nineteenth century, and still stood three or four meters high in 1940. Then it came down, along with the gates, and the town inside it stopped being a town and started being a district.
Everything that has happened to Al-Balad since follows from that. A walled city has a reason to be dense; an unwalled neighborhood in an expanding port does not. The merchants moved north to the Corniche, the coral houses emptied, and for half a century the finest surviving Red Sea vernacular architecture in the Kingdom sat there getting wetter.
Source: Jpatokal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
What the buildings are made of
The stone came out of the sea. Builders quarried coral from the Red Sea reefs — including from what was then Al-Ruwais beach and is now a neighborhood — and called it mengabi. They bound it not with cement but with sea mud, and they braced the whole thing with imported wood.
It is a strange material to build a city from and an extremely good one for this climate. Coral stone is porous, which means it breathes; it is light, which means you can go up five or six stories without a heavy frame; and it was, crucially, free and adjacent. Buildings put up this way have stood for centuries in a place that is hot, salty, and humid in combination — a set of conditions that destroys most things.
The rawashin, which are the point
The projecting wooden bay windows that cover the facades are called rawashin (singular roshan), and they are the reason people photograph this town. They are made of teak and other imported hardwoods, worked into lattice, and they cantilever out over the alleys.
They are also a piece of environmental engineering. The lattice lets air move through a room and light into it while making the interior invisible from the street, which, in a conservative merchant town, solved the problem of how a household ventilates in forty-degree heat without opening itself to the alley. Every element of it is doing two jobs at once.
The wood came by sea from India and Southeast Asia, which tells you what Jeddah was. This is not a desert town that acquired some decoration. It is a port whose houses were assembled from its own trade routes — reef below, teak from the ships.
Naseef House
Construction began in 1872 and finished by 1881, and the result is seven floors of coral stone in the middle of the old town. King Abdulaziz stayed here in 1925. It is now a museum, with exhibits and a lecture program.
The detail everyone remembers is the tree. A neem tree grows against the north side of the house, possibly the oldest tree in Jeddah, and it gave the building its local name: the house with the tree. In a town where every building is coral and teak, being the one with something green attached was distinction enough.
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Source: Richard Mortel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Beit Al Sharbatly, and the others
Beit Al Sharbatly went up in 1910, four stories, and is admired locally for its mashrabiyya balconies. It was damaged by flooding and restored most recently in 2009, and has since hosted exhibitions and cultural programming.
Around it sit the other named houses — Matbouli, Jamjoom — in various states of repair, and several hundred unnamed ones. The unnamed ones are the real inventory, and they are the reason the restoration program matters more than any single museum.
Al-Shafi’i Mosque
Parts of it are traced to the era of Caliph Omar bin Al-Khattab, which would make the site one of the oldest continuously used places of worship in the region. The minaret is estimated to be around nine hundred years old. It carries the name of Imam Muhammad ibn Idris Al-Shafi’i and was renovated under the sponsorship of the late King Abdullah.
These are officials’ estimates rather than published archaeological findings, and are worth holding loosely. What is not in doubt is that this is the oldest fabric in the inscribed area, and that it is still a working mosque rather than an exhibit.
Read also: Dar Tantora: thirty houses, seventeen hundred candles, no light switch.
The restoration
The Jeddah Historic District Program sits within the Ministry of Culture with an independent budget, established by royal decree in 2018, with a broader revitalization drive launched under the Crown Prince in 2021. Fifty-six historic buildings were identified for restoration in 2019, and that first tranche has been completed.
Fifty-six is a small number against several hundred surviving structures, and the honest way to read it is as a demonstration project — proof that the skills exist, the methods work, and the money will keep coming. Coral stone and teak are maintained materials rather than permanent ones. Theprogram’ss real test is not the first fifty-six buildings; it is the fifteenth year.
Source: SOM / Jay Langlois–Owens Corning, via ArchDaily
What is happening there now
Balad Al-Fann has run recurring arts and culture programming through the district — exhibitions, performance, handicraft and culinary work — with the 2024 edition themed Past Forward. Galleries and small hospitality businesses have started appearing in restored houses.
The Islamic Arts Biennale, organized by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, is staged not in Al-Balad but at the Western Hajj Terminal at the airport — the Aga Khan Award-winning tented structure a few kilometers north. Its editions have run January to May in 2023 and again in 2025, and it is the single strongest reason to time a Jeddah trip to the first half of the year.
Read also: Jeddah: the guide.
Going
Walk it in the late afternoon and stay into the evening. The alleys are narrow, the coral takes the low light extremely well, and Souq Al Alawi is a working market rather than a heritage reconstruction. Bab Makkah — the eastern gate, the one pilgrims left through for Mecca — was reconstructed and now stands about two hundred meters east of where the original was.
That relocation is a small, honest emblem of the whole exercise. The gate is in the wrong place because the wall it belonged to no longer exists, and the town is being rebuilt around an absence.
What is actually being saved
Not a skyline, and not a set of monuments. What Al-Balad preserves is a way of building that answered a specific climate with materials taken from a specific sea and a specific trade route, and did it well enough to stand for centuries without machinery.
The neem tree at Naseef House was there before the restoration program, before the UNESCO listing, before the wall came down. It will probably outlast the scaffolding too.
Featured Image Source: Francisco Anzola, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
