For two decades Riyadh was a city you flew into for meetings and out of the same week, and the hotels were built accordingly: large, comfortable, close to the ministries, entirely uninterested in whether you ever went outside. That version of Riyadh still exists. It is now sitting underneath a different one.
The change is not subtle and it is not mostly about hotels. It is that the city acquired places to go — a UNESCO site with a dining terrace attached, a luxury district with seven cinemas in it, a new-media art institution, and an entertainment season that draws millions of people between October and March. What follows is what is worth your time in the new version.
Source: Diriyah Company
Where to stay
Four hotels are doing genuinely different things.
The Ritz-Carlton is the grand one and the political one: fifty-two acres of gardens with six-hundred-year-old olive trees in them, sixty-two thousand square feet of event space, and a history as a venue for things that end up in the news. Forty-four kilometres from the airport, which in Riyadh traffic is a real number.
Mandarin Oriental Al Faisaliah took over the tower hotel in January 2024 — three hundred and twenty-five rooms and suites, nine dining venues, and The Globe, the restaurant inside the glass sphere near the top of a Foster + Partners tower that has defined the skyline since 2000. It is the most architecturally interesting place to sleep in the city.
The St. Regis is the small one: eighty-three keys, fifty-nine rooms and twenty-four suites, sitting inside the Via Riyadh complex. If your reason for coming is dining and shopping, it puts you inside the destination rather than a drive from it.
Four Seasons occupies the top of Kingdom Centre, the 302-metre tower with the skybridge, and Fairmont and Mansard cover the business districts — Mansard being the one with Carbone and Sadelle’s, imported from New York by Major Food Group, which was a statement of intent when it landed in 2022.
Bujairi Terrace and Diriyah — the half-day that matters
Diriyah is where the first Saudi state was founded in the fifteenth century, and At-Turaif, its mudbrick citadel district, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2010. It is the single most important historical site in central Arabia and for most of the last decade it was a construction site.
It is now open, and beside it sits Bujairi Terrace: fifteen thousand square metres of restaurants overlooking the citadel, built from the mud, water and straw of Diriyah itself using three-hundred-year-old Najdi methods. Twenty-odd venues, four of them with Michelin stars behind them elsewhere in the world.
Go late. At-Turaif opens at five in the afternoon and runs to midnight, and the mudbrick at dusk is the reason to be there.
Source: FACT Magazines
Via Riyadh — the other one
Opened in May 2023 in the Al Hada district, and it is not a mall. It is a compound of boutiques, restaurants, a theatre, a hotel and seven separate luxury cinemas, built in the Salmani style — the architectural language the state has formalised around six stated values, authenticity, human-centricity, liveability, continuity, innovation and sustainability.
The cinemas are the part people underestimate. Seven halls, each designed as a different room rather than a different screen size: one styled after a vintage train carriage, one arranged as a majlis with ground seating and Najdi detailing, one with beds. It is the most idiosyncratic cinema estate in the Gulf.
Source: Mandarin Oriental
The towers, and shopping
Riyadh’s skyline has two landmarks and both are worth an hour. Kingdom Centre is ninety-nine storeys and 302 metres, with the famous inverted-arch skybridge at the top and a fifty-seven-thousand-square-metre mall of more than a hundred and fifty stores below it. Al Faisaliah, by Foster + Partners and finished in 2000, is 267 metres with an observation deck at two hundred and a glass sphere above it holding The Globe.
For actual luxury shopping the newest answer is Solitaire — sixty-five thousand square metres of leasable space, opened in 2025, and the arrival of a serious flagship roster including Louis Vuitton, Dior, Celine, Fendi, Loewe, Chaumet and Tiffany. Via Riyadh is the more pleasant environment; Solitaire is where the brands are.
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Source: Sammy Six, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The museums
The National Museum, inside the King Abdulaziz Historical Centre, was designed by Raymond Moriyama and opened in 1999 — eight halls running from the formation of the universe through the pre-Islamic peninsula, the Prophet’s mission, the first and second Saudi states and the unification. It is the orientation for everything else you will see in the country, and it is still the best two hours in Riyadh.
Diriyah Art Futures opened in November 2024 as the region’s first new-media arts hub, a Museums Commission project with Diriyah Company. Its opening exhibition was about artificial intelligence in the visual arts, which is either admirably current or slightly on the nose, and the building is worth the trip regardless.
Riyadh Season, and whether to avoid it
From October each year the General Entertainment Authority runs Riyadh Season across zones including Boulevard City, Boulevard World and Al-Suwaidi Park — concerts, boxing, motor shows, parades. The 2025 edition took a million visitors in its first thirteen days and passed eight million by the winter.
It is enormous, it is not aimed at the luxury traveller, and it transforms the city’s traffic and hotel rates. Which makes it a scheduling decision rather than an attraction: if you want Riyadh busy, loud and at maximum energy, come in it. If you want a table at Bujairi and a quiet morning at the National Museum, come in March.
What to skip
Boulevard City and Boulevard World are enormous — nine hundred thousand square metres between them, nine sub-zones, a replica of Times Square — and they operate mainly during Riyadh Season. They are a genuine achievement of scale and they are not a luxury proposition. If you have three days, they are the first thing to cut.
The same goes for the mainstream malls. Riyadh has plenty and none of them is why you came.
One more thing about the food
Riyadh’s restaurant scene is currently an import market — Carbone and Sadelle’s from New York, Gymkhana and Berenjak from London, Long Chim by way of Perth and Bangkok — and the imports are genuinely good. But the more interesting cooking is at the two or three kitchens working from the peninsula’s own repertoire, and they are cheaper, quieter and harder to find.
Read also: The most beautiful new hotels in Saudi Arabia
Getting in
King Khalid International has five passenger terminals and a Royal Terminal, has been running since 1983, and covers two hundred and twenty-five square kilometres — among the largest airports on earth by land area. Its replacement is already announced: King Salman International, six parallel runways, a planned hundred and twenty million passengers a year by 2030, absorbing the existing terminals into a fifty-seven-square-kilometre footprint.
For now, allow for the drive. Riyadh is a city built at the scale of the car, and the forty-four kilometres between the airport and the Ritz-Carlton is not a number that improves at six in the evening.
Featured Image Source: Diriyah Company
