Khobar

Khobar was founded in 1923, when members of the Dawasir tribe settled this stretch of shallow Gulf shore with the permission of Ibn Saud, its people connected as much to Bahrain as to the Arabian interior. Its rise came from oil. After American geologists struck oil at Dhahran in 1938, the shore at Khobar was used to load the first crude onto barges for Bahrain, and a pier, offices and workers' housing followed. The town grew as the civilian settlement beside the Aramco compound, laid out on the grid of numbered streets that still orders the centre.

Through the 1950s and 1960s Khobar became the shopping and service town of the oil province, with shops selling imported goods to Aramco staff and Saudis from across the region. The deep-water port and government offices went to Dammam, the company and the university to Dhahran, and Khobar kept the trade, the restaurants and the hotels — a division of roles that survives. The opening of the King Fahd Causeway to Bahrain in 1986 made it the crossing point to the island and a weekend thoroughfare.

The city has seen violence at intervals: an attack on the Khobar Towers housing complex in 1996 killed nineteen American air force personnel, and an attack on two oil-industry offices and a foreign workers' compound in 2004 killed twenty-two people. Since then Khobar has continued to grow northward along the coast in malls, towers and villa districts, and the three cities of Khobar, Dammam and Dhahran have merged into a single conurbation of more than two million people.

Khobar's culture is Gulf coastal rather than inland Arabian. Families that once fished, pearled and traded with Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar share a dialect, music and cooking with them, and the causeway keeps that relationship alive: the crossing is a weekend habit for many. The city is also a meeting point of the province's Sunni majority and the Shia communities of Qatif and Al-Ahsa, who work and shop here.

Oil made it an international place. Aramco's presence brought Americans, Britons and other foreign staff from the 1940s, and the workforce today is heavily South Asian, Filipino, Egyptian and Levantine. That mix shows in the restaurants, the shopping streets and the languages heard in Al Thuqbah, and gives the city a reputation among Saudis as relaxed and outward-looking.

Social life happens in the evening and in three places: the Corniche, the malls and the cafés. Family sections and family days remain common in restaurants and parks, though the strict segregation of the past has eased, and since 2018 concerts, film screenings and sporting events have become part of the calendar. Ithra in Dhahran has made the area a centre for exhibitions, film and the arts. Manners are the kingdom's: unhurried greetings, the right hand for eating and giving, coffee and dates offered to guests, and restraint in public between men and women.

About 410,000 people live in Khobar itself and some 660,000 in its governorate, part of a Dammam–Khobar–Dhahran conurbation of well over two million. A large share of residents are foreign workers, and many households are tied to the oil industry, whether through Aramco itself, contractors, engineering firms or the shops and services that supply them.

The working week runs from Sunday to Thursday, and the roads fill twice a day as people commute between the three cities and out to Ras Tanura, Abqaiq and Jubail. Outside oil, the economy rests on retail, hospitality, healthcare, education and the cross-border trade with Bahrain. Housing is mostly villas and flats in gated or semi-gated districts, and almost every household depends on a car.

Life is lived indoors in summer, when air conditioning runs continuously and the malls serve as public space, and outdoors in the cool months, when the Corniche, the beaches at Half Moon Bay and the desert campsites fill at weekends. Water comes largely from desalination, and the strain of a growing population on power, water and traffic is a steady local concern, alongside the question of what a city built on oil will do as the kingdom diversifies.

Khobar eats well and cheaply by the standards of the kingdom. The Gulf supplies the local speciality: hamour, a grouper, along with shrimp, kingfish and smaller reef fish, grilled over charcoal or fried and served on spiced rice. Machboos, the Gulf version of kabsa, is rice cooked with meat or fish, dried lime and baharat spices; muhammar, rice sweetened with date syrup, is often eaten alongside fish. Mandi, meat and rice cooked in a pit oven and strongly associated with Yemeni cooking, is as popular here as anywhere in Saudi Arabia.

Breakfast can be balaleet, sweet saffron vermicelli topped with a thin omelette, or foul, stewed broad beans, with hot flat bread from a wall oven. Sweets lean to the Gulf and the Levant: luqaimat, small fried dumplings in date syrup, kunafa and baklava, and dates from the Al-Ahsa oasis inland, served with cardamom coffee.

The foreign workforce has made the city a place to eat food from elsewhere: biryani and karahi in the Pakistani grill houses of Al Thuqbah, dosa and curry in the South Indian canteens, Filipino rice dishes, Egyptian koshari, Syrian and Lebanese shawarma and mezze. Coffee culture is strong and growing, with speciality roasters and dessert cafés along the seafront roads that stay busy until well after midnight. Alcohol is illegal throughout the kingdom, and the drinks lists run to fresh juice, mint lemonade, Arabic coffee and tea.