Al Olaya District

The central business district of Riyadh, a stretch of commercial towers, luxury hotels, malls, and restaurants extending northward from King Fahad Road for several kilometres. This is where Kingdom Centre and Al Faisaliah Tower stand, where the major international banks and oil company offices are concentrated, and where the highest density of international restaurants and cafes in the city can be found.

Tahlia Street, running east-west through the district, has been pedestrianised in stretches and is lined with cafes and restaurants that stay busy well into the night. The district is well served by the metro. On weekday mornings it has the purposeful energy of a financial centre; on Thursday and Friday evenings (the Saudi weekend) it softens into a social scene of families and young people at the cafes.

things to do neighbourhood
A story
Al Olaya went from desert farmland to the financial capital of the Arab world in less than forty years. In the 1970s, when oil revenues began to reshape Saudi Arabia, the government chose the flat land north of the old city for the new business district, and construction continued in waves through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The result is a skyline built from scratch, without the layer-upon-layer history of organic urban growth that gives most cities their complexity.