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Country guide
At 2,149,690 square kilometres, Saudi Arabia is the largest country in the Middle East and the only one with coastline on both the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf — which is the fact that separates its cities. Riyadh, the capital, stands inland at the centre and is built at driving scale. Jeddah on the Red Sea is the older port, with a coral-stone historic quarter and the water at the end of the street, while Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam, are closed to non-Muslims. The 33.7 million people counted in 2024 are gathered into a handful of centres with long empty desert in between.
Every city catalogued in this country so far, ranked by how much there is to see.
Photograph · EROL AKBULUT · CC BY 3.0
Photograph · Saudi Press Agency (SPA) · CC BY-SA 4.0
Photograph · B.alotaby · CC BY-SA 4.0
Ranked by importance — sitelinks, pageviews and heritage status, not editor preference.
Al Masjid Al Haram is the mosque built around the Kaaba in the centre of Makkah, and it is the largest mosque in the world by area and by the number of people it holds.
The Kaaba is the cube-shaped building at the centre of Al Masjid Al Haram in Makkah, and it is the qiblah, the direction every Muslim in the world faces in prayer.
Jabal al-Nour, the Mountain of Light, is a bare rock peak on the north-eastern side of Mecca, a little over five kilometres from Al-Masjid al-Haram.
The Cave of Hira is a cleft in the rock near the top of Jabal al-Nour, the mountain that rises northeast of central Makkah.
The Plain of Arafat lies about 23 kilometres east of the Grand Mosque on the road between Makkah and Taif.
Jabal Thawr is a bare rock mountain on the southern edge of Makkah, rising above the ground south of the Misfalah district, and people climb it for one thing: the cave near its top, Ghar Thawr.
The Clock Tower Museum occupies the ninth floor of the Makkah Clock Tower, the central spire of the Abraj Al-Bait complex, which the operator also names as the King Abdulaziz Endowment for the Two Holy Mosques and describes as one…
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