Over the last few centuries, not much has changed in the village of Shuwaymis, which lies 400 miles and a dusty seven-hour drive north of Jeddah. But in 2001, a Bedouin told local teacher Mahboub Habbas al-Rasheedi that he’d found an undiscovered cache of rock art while grazing his camels. Mahboub spent the next several days searching for the site and eventually found hundreds of petroglyphs emblazoned on a honey-hued escarpment, including depictions of oryx, ostriches, leopards, cheetahs, and lions.
Not only did the discovery uncover the region’s largest collection of ancient rock art, dating back at least to the Bronze Age, but it added to scientists’ understanding of the ecological history of the Arabian peninsula. They already knew that creatures like lions and the Arabian leopard had roamed the area before being killed off by overhunting in the last century, but they now recognized that these animals had inhabited the region as far back as 3,000 BCE.
In recent years, Saudi Arabia has made a series of sweeping changes as part of Vision 2030, a government program with the goal of increased economic, social, and cultural diversification and deeper global engagement. A visible, tourist-facing aspect of this program is the ongoing development of the historical site of AlUla; another is the Saudi Green Initiative, which aims to increase the area of protected land in the country to about 249,000 square miles, more than 30% of the Arabian peninsula.
As part of the Green Initiative, the Kingdom has begun a massive conservation effort to rewild its deserts, protect endangered species, and restore native biodiversity. The plan includes nominating natural sites to UNESCO’S World Heritage List, developing nature-based tourism, and planting 10 billion trees.
Especially interesting is the Arabian Leopard Program, managed by the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), a captive-breeding project that aims to restore the big cats—currently fewer than 200 exist on the Arabian Peninsula—in the wild. Last year, the program successfully bred seven new cubs, bringing the total number of bred leopards to 27. They will be released into the surrounding Hijaz Mountains.
“The comprehensive regeneration of AlUla considered everything—heritage, culture, history, and wildlife in a single holistic approach,” says Stephen Browne, PhD, who serves as vice president of Wildlife & Natural Heritage for the RCU. And tourism is, according to Browne, a major way to fund conservation long-term. Like the new Red Sea project on the unspoiled Ummahat archipelago off the west coast, where 300 types of coral and 16 species of dolphins are attracting divers. Or the safari-style game drives in AlUla’s Sharaan Nature Reserve, where visitors can see Arabian wolves, striped hyenas, and oryx—proof that the biodiversity of the area isn’t limited to ancient petroglyphs.
This article appeared in the March 2024 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
