Every capital has a place it points at when it wants to explain itself. Riyadh’s is fifteen minutes northwest of the city centre, built out of the clay of the riverbed it sits beside, and it was reduced to rubble by artillery in 1818.
What is there now is a working evening destination wrapped around a World Heritage site. You can eat at twenty-odd restaurants on a terrace built with three-hundred-year-old mud-brick methods, walk into a ruined eighteenth-century capital after dark, and see a new-media art institution that did not exist two years ago. It is the single best half-day in Riyadh and most visitors give it ninety minutes.
What Diriyah is
Diriyah is a development company owned by the Public Investment Fund, working across roughly fourteen square kilometres with more than 236 billion riyals of approved masterplans behind it — eighteen thousand residential units, over half a million square metres of retail, and a stated ambition of more than twenty-eight hotels.
Almost none of that is built. What is open, and what this guide is about, is four things: At-Turaif, the World Heritage site; Bujairi Terrace, the restaurant district facing it; Zallal, the small mixed-use quarter next door; and Wadi Hanifah, the wadi that both sit above. There is one hotel.
That is not a criticism. Four things done properly is a better evening than forty things half-finished, and the four are unusually coherent.
Source: Unnaugan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Bujairi Terrace
Bujairi opened at the end of 2022 across fifteen thousand square metres, built in the Najdi style using mud-brick methods dating back three centuries. Within six months it had taken more than a million visitors, and it won Riyadh Municipality’s award for architectural and urban creativity, which for a restaurant terrace is an unusual honour and, standing in it, a deserved one.
The tenant list is deliberately international at the top end — Chez Bruno, Tatel, Hakkasan and Long Chim all carry Michelin recognition elsewhere — with Altopiano, Maiz, Cova, Villa Mamas, Somewhere and Joe & The Juice filling in around them, and Dolce & Gabbana and Drb holding the retail. Across Diriyah as a whole the company counts thirty dining venues: eleven restaurants, ten café-restaurants, six at Zallal and three at the hotel.
The terrace holds over three thousand people and opens from nine in the morning until three the following morning. Between 1 May and 30 September access is free.
The reason to be here is not the food, which is good rather than revelatory. It is the view. Bujairi faces At-Turaif across the wadi, and at dusk the floodlights come up on the ruins while you are sitting at dinner. It is the most theatrical restaurant setting in the Gulf and nobody had to build the theatre.
Zallal
Zallal is the least-visited part of Diriyah and the most revealing. It is the development’s first mixed-use commercial quarter — around fourteen thousand square metres of leasable space, split between two low-rise office buildings of six thousand square metres and twelve retail and food units taking the other eight, over fourteen hundred basement parking spaces.
Its tenants tell you what Diriyah is actually trying to be: Aseeb, doing Najdi cooking; Oulu, doing Italian; the Saudi Artisanal Company; a co-working operation called Diom. Offices, a coffee shop and a workspace, in the same architectural language as the heritage site. This is the part that has to work if Diriyah is to become a district rather than an attraction.
Source: Ahmedpictures12, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
At-Turaif, after dark
The ticket that matters is Diriyah Access, which covers At-Turaif subject to availability and carries credit redeemable at every Bujairi café and restaurant except Dolce & Gabbana. Two things to know. A ticket does not guarantee you a table — book the restaurant separately. And Diriyah’s own pages give two different sets of opening hours for At-Turaif, so take the times on the ticketing site as the ones that count on the day.
Inside are six museums and galleries: the visitor centre, the Diriyah Gallery, the Traditional Architecture Gallery, the Military Gallery, the Arabian Horse Gallery and Sbalat Modhi. There are forty-five-minute guided tours, audio tours, and a self-guided route that will take you two to three hours if you let it. At Salwa Palace there is a nightly projection piece, Salwa Lights, thrown onto the walls of the ruin.
Over a million people a year come. Go on a weekday, arrive when it opens rather than at nine, and do the site before dinner rather than after — the projections are better in full dark, but the architecture is better when you can still see the mud.
Diriyah Art Futures
The most interesting building at Diriyah is the newest and the least publicised. Diriyah Art Futures opened on 26 November 2024 as the first new-media arts institution in the Middle East and North Africa, developed by the Ministry of Culture’s Museums Commission with Diriyah Company, under the direction of Haytham Nawar.
It runs to roughly six and a half thousand square metres by the Italian studio Schiattarella Associati, holding digital labs, studios and exhibition space, with a residency and a master’s programme attached. Its opening exhibition was about artificial intelligence in the visual arts.
A country that is spending heavily on eighteenth-century restoration also building a new-media institution three hundred metres away is not a contradiction. It is the whole argument, stated in two buildings.
The practical part
Parking at Bujairi is ten riyals an hour. At Samhan it is thirty riyals for the first three hours and ten an hour after. Valet is a hundred and ninety-five riyals, waived between May and September if you spend a hundred and fifty on dinner.
Drive rather than walk between Diriyah and central Riyadh; it is fifteen minutes and there is no useful public transport link. Allow four hours if you are doing At-Turaif and dinner, which you should be.
Read also: Riyadh: the guide
Why this is the place to start
Riyadh is a difficult city to like quickly. It is enormous, it is built for cars, and its best things are dispersed. Diriyah is the exception: one site, one evening, and the entire argument of the country in walking distance — where the state began, what it was built out of, what it eats now, and what it wants to be next.
If you have one evening in Riyadh, spend it here. If you have two, spend the second one here as well, earlier in the day, when the site is empty.
Featured Image Source: ほっきー, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
