Riyadh is the capital and largest city of Saudi Arabia, sitting at around 600 metres above sea level on the high limestone plateau of the Nejd in the centre of the Arabian Peninsula. The name in Arabic means "gardens," a reference to the date palms and cultivated plots that once made this desert settlement viable. Today it is a sprawling metropolitan area of over seven million people, one of the fastest-growing cities on earth in the latter half of the twentieth century, and a place undergoing a second transformation in the third decade of the twenty-first.
The city divides into two essentially different worlds. The historic core — the Qasr al-Hukm District, the Masmak Fortress, the old covered souqs — tells the story of the walled desert fortress-town that Abdul Aziz ibn Saud seized in 1902 and used as the springboard for building a state. The King Abdul Aziz Historical Centre, which includes the National Museum and the restored Murabba Palace, is the best account of this history anywhere. The second world is the al-Olaya District — the glass-and-steel business quarter where Kingdom Centre and the Al Faisaliah Tower punctuate a skyline that was empty desert forty years ago.
Outside the city proper, Diriyah — the original capital of the first Saudi state, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site — is one of the most impressive heritage destinations in the Middle East: mud-brick palaces and mosques spread across a clifftop above the palm-filled Wadi Hanifah, which has been restored from a polluted drainage channel into a 120-kilometre greenway threading through the city. The western horizon is bounded by the Tuwaiq Escarpment, a limestone cliff that served as the main navigational landmark for caravan routes across the Nejd.
The social transformation underway since 2017 — cinemas reopened after a 35-year ban, women permitted to drive, concerts and sporting events now regular — means that Riyadh the visitor experiences today is substantially different from the city of a decade ago. The Boulevard Riyadh City entertainment district, the public art programme across al-Olaya, and the Diplomatic Quarter's restaurants and walking paths all reflect a city that is consciously reimagining its relationship with public life. The heat will always be extreme from May to September — Riyadh sits in one of the hottest places on earth — but from October through April the plateau climate is genuinely pleasant, and the Deera Square and Souq al-Zal area rewards slow walking at any season.