Riyadh had to be given a reason to visit. Jeddah has been the place people arrive for fourteen hundred years, because it is the port for Mecca, and a city that has been receiving pilgrims since the seventh century does not need an entertainment authority to give it character.
What it needed was maintenance, and it is finally getting it. The result is a city with a UNESCO-listed old town under active restoration, a corniche with the tallest fountain of its kind in the world on it, a coral reef twenty minutes offshore, and a hotel stock that has improved more in three years than in the previous thirty.
Where to stay
The Jeddah EDITION is the one that changed the conversation. It opened on 2 May 2024 with sixty-three keys — fifty-two rooms and eleven suites — as EDITION’s twentieth property worldwide and its first in Saudi Arabia, designed by Yabu Pushelberg, on the Corniche beside the yacht club and within reach of Al-Balad. It is small, deliberately, and it is the most current thing in the city.
The Ritz-Carlton, Jeddah is the grand one: 224 rooms, including 30 Royal Suites of 500 square meters each, opened in 2015 across more than eight acres on the Al Hamra Corniche, overlooking the fountain. If you want the traditional Jeddah luxury experience executed properly, this is it.
Shangri-La Jeddah opened on 22 February 2022 — Founding Day, which was not an accident — with two hundred and twenty keys inside Burj Assila, a sixty-four-story, two-hundred-and-sixty-meter tower. The outdoor pool is twenty-five meters and sits on the seventh floor.
Waldorf Astoria Jeddah – Qasr Al Sharq is the outlier: forty-six suites and nothing else, in a palace on the North Corniche whose name translates as Palace of the East. Park Hyatt, a hundred and forty-two rooms since 2009, sits in a thirty-four-acre complex by the Equestrian Club. Rosewood holds the Al Shatie beachfront with Asaya wellness and a rooftop. Assila, a Luxury Collection Hotel, carries three hundred and four rooms plus ninety-four apartments and a genuinely good contemporary Saudi art collection.
One more is coming, and it is worth knowing about: Mandarin Oriental announced a Jeddah property in November 2025 for the Jeddah Central waterfront district — four hundred and forty-two units across hotel, apartments, and residences, with a stated opening of 2030.
Source: Jpatokal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Al-Balad, which is the reason to come
Historic Jeddah was inscribed by UNESCO in 2014 under three criteria, covering just under eighteen hectares with a buffer zone of a hundred and thirteen more — roughly a third of the original walled city. It is a town of coral-stone tower houses hung with rawashin, the projecting teak lattice bay windows that ventilated a room without exposing the people inside it.
It is being restored by the Jeddah Historic District Program, established by royal decree in 2018 under the Ministry of Culture, with a revitalization drive launched in 2021. Fifty-six buildings were identified for restoration in 2019, and that program has been completed.
Give it an evening rather than an hour, and go after five, when the light is on the coral, and the souq is working.
Source: Ferdinand Reus, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Corniche and the fountain
King Fahd’s Fountain throws a jet three hundred and twelve meters into the air at speeds up to three hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. It was built between 1980 and 1983, formally inaugurated in 1985, and entered the Guinness records as the tallest fountain of its kind. Its base is shaped as a traditional incense burner, and it carries around five hundred lights.
It runs from about six in the evening until after midnight, stops for roughly three weeks of maintenance a year, and shuts down in strong southerly winds. It is visible from most of the Corniche and from the sea-facing rooms of half the hotels in this guide, which is a large part of what those rooms are priced on.
The water. Jeddah’s
Jeddah’s reefs start about an hour offshore by fast boat and include wall dives, drifts, pinnacles and wrecks. PADI’s own figures for the area give water temperatures of twenty-one to twenty-eight degrees year-round and visibility of twenty to fifty meters.
This is the least-marketed thing about Jeddah and one of the best. A city of four million people with that quality of reef an hour away is an unusual arrangement, and it is available on a weekday morning without booking a liveaboard.
Eating, and the guide that arrived
MICHELIN published its first Saudi Arabian selection in February 2026, covering Riyadh, Jeddah and AlUla. Two Jeddah restaurants took a Bib Gourmand: The Lucky Llama, doing Nikkei, and Samia’s Dish in Al Zahra, cooking traditional Hijazi. A third Jeddah restaurant, Yaza, took the guide’s Service Award, cited for greeting guests with Arabic coffee and dates.
The pattern in that list is worth noticing. Jeddah’s recognition came for Hijazi cooking and for hospitality, not for an imported name. Riyadh’s restaurant scene is currently an import market; Jeddah’s is not, and the guide picked up on it in its first year.
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Source: Richard Mortel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Shopping, and the honest verdict on it
Red Sea Mall opened in 2008 at around 242,000 square meters; Mall of Arabia runs to 261,000. They are large, comprehensive, and exactly like large, comprehensive malls elsewhere.
Jeddah is not a shopping destination and does not need to be. The thing to buy here is in Souq Al Alawi in Al-Balad, and it is not a handbag.
Timing and the Grand Prix
The Saudi Arabian Grand Prix runs at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit, a 6.174-kilometer street track first raced on 5 December 2021. The 2026 edition was held from 17 to 19 April. Race weekend transforms the Corniche and the hotel rates attached to it, in both directions depending on what you want.
Jeddah Season, the city’s summer entertainment program, ran from 12 July to 4 October in 2025. Otherwise, the calendar is governed by heat and humidity: Jeddah in August is genuinely hard work, and the window from November to March is the one to use.
Source: SOM / Jay Langlois–Owens Corning, via ArchDaily
Getting in
King Abdulaziz International Airport’s Terminal 1 opened in September 2019 — eight hundred and ten thousand square meters, forty-six gates, capacity for up to seventy aircraft at once including the A380, built for thirty million passengers a year with a stated ambition beyond eighty million by 2035.
Its neighbor is the more interesting building. The Hajj Terminal, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with Fazlur Rahman Khan as structural engineer, won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in the 1981-83 cycle: two hundred and ten fabric tent units across forty and a half hectares, the largest fabric roof in the world when it was built, designed to shelter tens of thousands of pilgrims at a time. It now also hosts the Islamic Arts Biennale, which is a rather good second act for an airport terminal.
Read also: Riyadh: the guide.
Two cities, and which one you want
Riyadh is the capital,l and it is being assembled at speed, brilliantly and expensively, with a clear idea of what it wants to become. Jeddah already knows what it is, and its project is repair rather than invention.
For a first trip to Saudi Arabia, Riyadh is the more impressive city, and Jeddah is the better one. The old town is the reason, the reef is the surprise, and the fountain is there every evening whether you booked it or not.
Featured Image Source: Basheer Olakara, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
