Qasr al-Farid

Qasr al-Farid, "the Lonely Castle", is the largest tomb at Hegra, the Nabataean city in the desert north of AlUla, and it owes its name to its solitude. Most of Hegra's more than one hundred monumental tombs are cut side by side into the faces of sandstone massifs; this one was carved on its own into a single great boulder standing apart on the plain, so that the whole rock has become the monument. Its façade rises about twenty metres, and in the low sun of early morning or late afternoon the stone glows from pale gold to deep orange against the sand.

The Nabataeans, the traders who built Petra some 500 km to the north-west, made Hegra their great southern city in the first century CE, and the tomb dates from that period. Its façade follows the local style but pushes it further: above the doorway, with its pediment and framing pilasters, rise a heavy cornice and the stepped crown typical of Nabataean tombs, while the front is divided by four large pilasters instead of the usual two, a feature found nowhere else at the site. It has often been associated with a man named Lihyan son of Kuza, although scholars do not agree whether the name really belongs to this tomb.

The most striking detail is that it was never finished. The carvers evidently worked from the top down: the upper part is crisp and finely dressed, while the lowest third still shows rough, unsmoothed rock and chisel marks. Standing in front of it, you can read the working method of the ancient masons directly off the stone, and see where the work stopped. Hegra became Saudi Arabia's first World Heritage Site in 2008, and Qasr al-Farid, alone on its patch of desert, has become its emblem; Google chose it for the doodle marking Saudi National Day in 2016.

Getting there

Hegra lies north of AlUla; the town is about 19 km from the tomb, and AlUla International Airport (ULH) about 36 km. Visits to Hegra are organised as guided tours that start from the Hegra Visitor Centre, which visitors reach by car, taxi or the local ride app; there is free parking at the site's South Gate, where tour meeting points are located.