Jeddah

Jeddah is an old harbour on a break in the Red Sea reef, settled by fishing communities long before Islam. Its modern history begins in 647, when the caliph Uthman made it the official port for pilgrims travelling to Mecca, about sixty-five kilometres inland. For the next thirteen centuries the town lived on that traffic and on the trade that came with it, handling coffee from Yemen, spices and textiles from India and the East Indies, and the merchants who moved them. It was walled against attack, and the coral-stone houses inside the walls grew tall and narrow because space was short.

The Portuguese besieged it unsuccessfully in 1517, the year Ottoman authority arrived; Ottoman governors, Egyptian forces under Muhammad Ali and the Sharifs of Mecca all held it in turn over the following centuries. In 1916 it joined Sharif Hussein's Kingdom of Hejaz, and in December 1925 it surrendered to Ibn Saud after a long blockade, bringing it into what became Saudi Arabia in 1932. Because the foreign legations stayed here rather than move inland, Jeddah served as the kingdom's diplomatic capital until the embassies transferred to Riyadh.

Oil revenue transformed it from the 1950s. The old walls had come down in the 1940s, the port was rebuilt as one of the Red Sea's largest, and the city spread north along the coast in a belt of highways, malls and towers while much of Al-Balad decayed. That neglect preserved it: the old town was inscribed by UNESCO in 2014 and has been under restoration since, at the same time as sweeping demolition of informal districts elsewhere in the city and a run of new projects along the seafront.

Jeddah calls itself different — ghair, in the local phrase — and means it. Centuries of pilgrims who arrived and never left gave the city families of Indonesian, Indian, Hadhrami, Turkish, Bukharan, African and Levantine descent, and that mixture shows in surnames, cooking and the softer, loanword-rich Hejazi Arabic spoken here. Jeddawis regard themselves as more open and less formal than the interior, and outsiders have long treated the city as the kingdom's cultural release valve.

The art scene is the clearest expression of it. Private galleries and a long-standing collectors' culture supported artists through decades when public display was limited; the Corniche was filled with modern sculpture in the 1970s and 1980s; and since 2021 the Red Sea International Film Festival has brought international cinema to Al-Balad. Restored old-town houses now hold exhibitions, craft workshops and concerts, and a speciality-coffee scene has grown across the newer districts.

Older traditions hold alongside. The mizmar, danced with long sticks to drums, is performed at Hejazi weddings; the roshan balcony is a civic emblem; and family visiting, long evening hospitality and the offering of Arabic coffee with dates structure social life. Religion still orders the day, with shops closing at prayer times, and Ramadan is the city's high season, when Al-Balad stays awake until dawn. Dress in public remains modest, and courtesy is unhurried and formal.

Close to four million people live in Jeddah, making it the kingdom's second city and, by a wide margin, its busiest port. A large share of residents are foreign workers, from South Asia, Egypt, Yemen, the Philippines and elsewhere, and the mix of languages on a building site or in a market is part of daily life. People live mostly in apartment blocks and villa compounds in the northern and inland districts, and commute along a few congested coastal arteries.

The economy is trade, logistics and services. Jeddah Islamic Port handles much of Saudi Arabia's imports, the airport moves millions of pilgrims a year, and banks, family conglomerates, construction firms and hospitals employ much of the professional class. Industry sits on the southern edge and along the coast, and tourism, entertainment and property development have grown quickly under the kingdom's economic diversification programme.

The city lives at night. Work and school run in the morning, the hottest hours are spent indoors, and after sunset the Corniche, the malls and the restaurants fill until well after midnight, with children out with their families. The weekend is Friday and Saturday, spent at the beach compounds of Obhur or by the sea. Current issues include the large-scale demolition of older informal neighbourhoods for redevelopment, the cost of housing, traffic, and flooding when the rare heavy rain comes.

Jeddah's cooking is Hejazi, shaped by the sea and by the pilgrim trade. Sayadiya — fish with cumin-spiced rice and onion cooked dark and sweet — is the local seafood dish, and Red Sea hammour and other fish are grilled or fried whole, often bought at the fish market and cooked to order nearby. Saleeg, rice simmered in broth and milk until creamy and served with chicken, comes from the highlands behind the city; mandi and madfun, pit-cooked meat and rice, arrived with Yemeni and Hadhrami settlers; and kabsa, spiced rice with lamb or chicken, is the standard family meal.

The street food is the city's pride. Mutabbaq, a sheet of near-transparent pastry folded around egg, minced meat and leek and fried on a griddle, is sold from hatches in Al-Balad; balila, boiled chickpeas with cumin and lemon, is eaten from a paper cup; and foul — fava beans stewed with cumin — with flatbread baked against the wall of a clay oven, is the standard breakfast. Ramadan brings sambusak, soups and sobia, a lightly fermented sweet drink of barley and dry bread long associated with the Hejaz.

Sweets run to kunafa, basbousa and date-filled ma'amoul, and Arabic coffee spiced with cardamom is poured from a long-spouted dallah with dates alongside. Alcohol is illegal, so social life runs on coffee, tea and fresh juice: mango, guava and pomegranate stands are everywhere, and a modern speciality-coffee culture has taken hold across the northern districts. Al Baik, the fried-chicken chain founded here in 1974, is a local institution in its own right.