Abha & Najran

Abha has its own airport, and you are met there and driven to your hotel. The town sits high in the Sarawat mountains, so the air is noticeably cooler than the coast or the interior. The rest of the day is yours.

A day on the escarpment above and below Abha. You ride the cable car down the cliff face at Al Habala Park, named for the rope ladders once used to reach the village on the ledge below, and take in the drop from the top before going over the edge.

The rest of the day is spent on the trails of Asir National Park among juniper and terraced farmland, with time at the local markets in town. Al Soudah, the highest peak in Saudi Arabia, is one of the attractions reached from Abha.

Down the escarpment road to Rijal Almaa, about 45 kilometres from Abha. The drive itself is a large part of why people make the trip.

The village is built of dark basalt laid in courses, with lines of white quartz set into the outer walls to shed rain, stacked up the mountainside so tightly that from the valley floor it reads as one building. Inside, the walls carry Al-Qatt Al-Asiri - geometric bands of bright colour painted by the women of the house directly onto the plaster, a practice UNESCO added to its intangible heritage list in 2017. Several houses are open as a museum, with around 20 sections of manuscripts, farming tools and household pieces, and there is a visitor centre at the village. No ticket is needed to enter.

You travel on to Najran, with the transfer arranged around your arrival time. Najran sits between mountains, oases and desert, and its architecture is its own thing: tall mud-brick houses with white-painted crenellations, closer to Yemeni building than to Najdi.

The afternoon is spent among them, at Al-Aan Palace, Qasr Al Emara and the Najran Regional Museum.

Al-Okhdood in the morning. It was a walled city on the caravan route that carried frankincense north out of southern Arabia, and it lies close enough to the surface that the street plan is still readable: stone walls, foundations, and blocks carved with inscriptions and animal figures.

North of the city, Hima is a cluster of desert wells added to the World Heritage List in 2021. Travellers have watered here for roughly 7,000 years and left a record on the rocks the whole time, running through Musnad, Aramaic-Nabataean, South Arabian, Greek and Arabic script. The wells still hold water, which is unusual for a site of this age.

A slow morning, then the transfer to Najran airport for your onward flight.