![]() Not here: private chalets look out onto works by Nadim Karam, Manal AlDowayan and SUPERFLEX, and an IKB Lita Albuquerque work – erroneously trumpeted as the first female figurative sculpture in Saudi in a millennium – can be seen from the infinity pool. In California, Desert X operates with an ethos of leave no trace and works are dismantled after each run. “We are not opening a resort, we are opening a city and a country,” said the manager of Habitas, a new eco-luxe resort built in the same valley in which the inaugural Desert X AlUla, the Saudi edition – one of many soft-power handshakes – of the Coachella Valley-based Land-art exhibition, was held in 2020. It’s as utterly magical as it is artificial. All around AlUla, magnificent rock formations running the gamut from ochre-red to basalt-grey rise out of the desert, now shot with palm and citrus groves as part of an aggressive oasis-regeneration programme. Ancient history is being revitalised everywhere you look, with a tourist infrastructure that sutures the Iron Age to Saudi Arabia’s masterplan of Vision 2030 (a strategic framework that aims to reduce Saudi Arabia’s dependence on oil by developing the cultural, educational, health, tourism and recreation sectors). Nearby, a language institute offers courses in Chinese, French and Nabatean. The latter hasn’t been used for some 1,600 years. Written on them is the slogan Keep AlUla clean. They come in pairs of green and brown, the former for recycling and the latter for mixed trash, and are placed at intervals up and down the arterial street of the Old Town, a heritage site dating back to the twelfth century. The most exciting thing that I saw in AlUla, a remote town in north-western Saudi Arabia, were some dustbins. ![]() ![]() Rahel Aima unearths ancient scripts and thermodynamic sea creatures in one of the Arabian Peninsula’s oldest cities
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