Rijal Almaa

Rijal Almaa is a village of stone towers in a deep valley of the Asir mountains in southwestern Saudi Arabia, below the escarpment west of Abha. Around sixty houses stand packed together on the slope, many of them several storeys high and some rising to as many as eight floors. They are built of stone, clay and wood, their dark walls banded with courses of white quartz, and pierced by small windows framed in brightly painted wood. Seen from across the valley, the cluster rises like a single fortified building against the mountainside.

The village is held to be more than 900 years old, and its prosperity came from its position on the routes that linked Yemen with Mecca, Medina and the Levant. Inside the houses, the walls are covered with the painting tradition of the Asir region, al-qatt al-asiri: bold geometric patterns of lines, triangles and squares in red, green, yellow and white, traditionally laid on by the women of the household. The skill and richness of these paintings once showed a family's standing. In 2017 al-qatt al-asiri was inscribed by UNESCO on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

One of the largest houses, the Al Alwan palace, more than four centuries old, holds the Rijal Almaa Heritage Museum, with over two thousand objects and documents in nineteen sections. A rehabilitation project for the village began in 2015, and in 2017 it received the Prince Sultan bin Salman award for urban heritage. Climbing the stairs from room to room, past painted walls and window frames, gives the clearest sense of how vertical this architecture is.

Getting there

Rijal Almaa is about 45–50 km by road from Abha, roughly an hour's drive; the straight-line distance is about 25 km. The road descends the escarpment through the pass of Aqabat Sama in a series of steep, tight bends with wide views over the mountains. The nearest airport is Abha International Airport (AHB), about 41 km away.