The southern highlands and the coast

Abha has its own airport. You are met and driven up into the town, which is high enough in the mountains to stay cool when the rest of the country is not. Summer is the high season here, the reverse of everywhere else in Saudi Arabia. The evening is free.

A day on the escarpment: the cable cars that run down it, the trails of Asir National Park, and Al Habala Park, named for the rope ladders once used to reach the village on the cliff below. Al Soudah, the highest peak in the country, is one of the Aseer sights reached from Abha. The Asir escarpment is why Saudis themselves travel here in summer.

The escarpment road down to Rijal Almaa, a village of stone tower houses about 45 kilometres from Abha. The houses are dark stone laid in courses with lines of white quartz set into the walls to shed rain, stacked up the mountainside so tightly the village reads as one structure from the valley floor. Inside, the walls carry Al-Qatt Al-Asiri, geometric bands of bright colour painted by the women of the house straight onto the plaster; UNESCO added the practice to its intangible heritage list in 2017. Several houses are open as a museum, and there is a visitor centre at the village. The drive down is a large part of why people make the trip.

You travel on to Najran, out of the mountains and into the country between mountains, oases and desert. Najran's own architecture is distinct: tall mud-brick houses with white-painted crenellations, closer to Yemeni building than to the Najdi style of central Arabia. You arrive in the afternoon and walk the old quarter around the Emirate Palace.

Al-Okhdood is a walled pre-Islamic city in Najran, close enough to the surface that the street plan is still readable. It stood on the caravan route that carried frankincense north out of southern Arabia. What survives is the outline: stone walls, foundations, and blocks carved with inscriptions and animal figures, along with the Rahha rock used for grinding wheat. There is no entry ticket. In the afternoon, the Najran Regional Museum holds the finds taken off the site.

North of the city, Hima is a cluster of desert wells surrounded by rock inscriptions, added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021. The wells have supplied water on the caravan route for roughly 7,000 years and travellers left a record on the rocks the whole time, in Musnad, Aramaic-Nabataean, South Arabian, Greek and Arabic scripts, so one site carries the peninsula's writing systems in sequence. The wells still hold water.

You travel on to Jazan, a port city stretching more than 200 kilometres along the southern tip of Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast. In the afternoon you take the ferry out to the Farasan Islands, so the crossing is planned into the day rather than left to chance. You stay on the main island.

A full day on the archipelago, recognised under UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere programme as Saudi Arabia's first natural reserve of its kind. Turquoise water surrounds more than 200 islands and coral islets, with reef systems that get very little pressure; dolphins, sea turtles, migratory birds and the Farasan gazelle are all here. There is Ottoman and older building on the main island. The return ferry runs in the afternoon and you spend the last night back in Jazan.

A free morning depending on your flight, then a transfer for your onward journey.