Every article about the Saudi Red Sea is about the resorts, which is understandable, because the resorts cost tens of billions of dollars and are extremely photogenic. But the coast they are built on has been inhabited and worked for a very long time, and the towns along it are the more interesting proposition for anyone who has already seen an overwater villa.
There are four of them, spread over several hundred kilometres of coastline, and they are administered together by a single development authority covering Yanbu, Umluj, Al Wajh and Duba.
Source: Richard Mortel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Umluj
Umluj governorate covers about sixteen thousand square kilometres of Tabuk province with a population of 69,656 at the 2022 census — the second most populous governorate in the province, which tells you how empty this coast is.
Offshore lies an archipelago of a hundred and three islands. Travel media has settled on calling it the Maldives of Saudi Arabia, which is lazy and also, in the specific matter of water colour over shallow sand, not entirely wrong. The islands are uninhabited, the largest in the province is Jabal Hassan, and the visitor infrastructure amounts to boat operators in the harbour.
The thing worth driving for is inland. Harrat Lunayyir is a volcanic crater field — black lava on pale desert, cones you can walk up, and a landscape that looks nothing like the postcard version of Saudi Arabia. Sea turtles, dolphins and migratory birds use the coast, and the mango farms behind the town are a genuine surprise in a place this arid.
Al Wajh
Al Wajh sits further north — 49,948 people at the 2022 census, a hundred and sixty-seven kilometres from NEOM and three hundred and fifty-one from Tabuk’s airport, with a small domestic airport of its own handling up to a hundred thousand passengers a year and due to reopen this year.
Its lagoon is the reason to come: enclosed by an archipelago of ninety-two islands, dropping to sixty metres, overlooking one of the densest coral reef systems in the Red Sea and holding nursery habitat for endangered species. This is the water the northern resorts are built beside.
The town has old coastal architecture, some of it in villages now uninhabited and visited rather than lived in. The landmarks are Al-Souq Fort and Zurayb Castle, and the historic port here linked the coast to the Nabataean trade routes running inland to Hegra — the same network that made AlUla.
Duba
The northernmost of the four: 54,917 people across twelve and a half thousand square kilometres, a hundred and eighty kilometres southwest of Tabuk city.
Duba’s port, established in 1994, is the closest Saudi port to the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean, which is the single fact that explains the town. Around it are al-Disah, Jabal Shar, Nu’man Island, al-Qaf beach and Wadi Ainounah, and King Abdulaziz Castle, built in 1933.
If you are driving the coast road north towards NEOM, this is where you stop.
Read also: The last hour is the hard part: getting to the Red Sea
The airport that changed the arithmetic
None of this was practically reachable until recently. Red Sea International Airport opened to domestic flights on 11 December 2023 and to international services on 15 August 2024, with Qatar Airways joining in October 2025 alongside Saudia and flydubai. Red Sea Global reports around seventy weekly flights.
It is also a genuinely good building. Foster + Partners designed it as five dune-like pods arranged radially, each a self-contained mini-terminal that can be closed in low season — an airport that shrinks. There is a runway, a separate seaplane runway and three helipads, and it is built to run on renewable power with capacity for a million passengers a year by 2030.
Onward transfer is by electric vehicle, boat or seaplane. The seaplane is not a novelty here; it is how the far islands are reached.
The far south, which is a different country
Six hundred miles down the coast, forty to ninety kilometres offshore from Jazan, the Farasan Islands are the outlier in every respect.
The protected area was established in 1989 and covers 5,408 square kilometres, of which only around seven hundred and ten are land — more than a hundred and seventy islands and islets of uplifted coral reef, the largest being Farasan al-Kabir at 381 square kilometres. It is now the sixth largest protected area managed by the National Center for Wildlife, and it was added to Saudi Arabia’s UNESCO tentative list in January 2019 for its biodiversity.
What lives there is the point. The islands hold an endemic gazelle subspecies, Gazella gazella farasani, and the largest idmi gazelle population in the country. Greater flamingos, pink-backed pelicans, ospreys and sooty falcons use the islands; dugongs and turtles use the water; there is an endemic snake found nowhere else.
And there is the Hareed festival, held each year between late March and early April, when a parrotfish species schools in the shallows. Fishermen encircle them with nets and barriers of shrub and take them on the chief fisherman’s signal. It has run for more than twenty editions as an official event, with crafts, marine competitions and traditional performances around it, and it is the most genuinely local thing on this entire coastline.
How to use any of this
The honest position is that these towns have modest hotel stock and are not set up for luxury travel. What they are set up for is a day, from a base at the resorts or from Yanbu, with a driver and a boat.
Take one day out of a Red Sea stay and drive to Harrat Lunayyir, or take a boat into the Umluj archipelago, or go into Al Wajh and look at the fort. The resorts are extraordinary and they are also entirely self-contained, which after three days begins to feel like the point of them and then, quite quickly, like the problem with them.
The coast is right there. It has a hundred and three islands off one town and ninety-two off another, a volcanic field an hour inland, and a fishing festival in the south that predates every hotel on this page by several centuries.
Featured Image Source: Abdalrahman Mohrat, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
