Riyadh

Riyadh grew from Hajr al-Yamamah, an oasis settlement in Wadi Hanifa that was the main town of the al-Yamamah district in early Islamic times. The name Riyadh, meaning "the gardens", came into use for the cluster of palm groves and farms that succeeded it. The place stayed small and walled while nearby Diriyah, a few kilometres up the valley, rose from 1727 as the capital of the first Saudi state; when an Ottoman-Egyptian army destroyed Diriyah in 1818, Riyadh inherited its role, and Turki ibn Abdullah made it the capital of the second Saudi state in the 1820s.

Rivalry within the family weakened the state, and in 1891 the Al Rashid of Ha'il took the town and drove the Saudis into exile in Kuwait. In January 1902 the young Abdulaziz Ibn Saud returned with a small party, scaled a wall by night and captured the Masmak fort, killing the Rashidi governor. That raid began the campaign that ended with the proclamation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, with Riyadh as its capital — still a walled mud-brick town, with some forty thousand people in the mid-1930s.

Oil revenue changed everything after the Second World War. The walls came down in the 1950s, the Murabba palace and then whole planned districts were built outside them, ministries and later the foreign embassies moved from Jeddah, and the population grew from about 150,000 in the 1960s to millions by the 2000s. The city spread north along King Fahd Road in towers of glass. Since 2016 the Vision 2030 programme has added a driverless metro, the rebuilt heritage quarter at Diriyah and a season of concerts and sport, and the city has been preparing for Expo 2030 and the 2034 football World Cup.

Riyadh regards itself as the guardian of Najdi identity. The Najdi dialect is the prestige speech of the kingdom, Nabati poetry is still composed and recited, and the ardah — a line of men with swords, drums and chanted verse — is performed at national occasions. Falconry, camel racing and weekend camps in the sand are long-standing enthusiasms, and the majlis, a reception room where guests are served cardamom coffee and dates in a fixed order of courtesy, remains the setting for both family and business life.

The city has long been the most religiously conservative of the kingdom's major centres, and the rhythm of the five daily prayers still shapes the day. Change has come quickly: cinemas reopened in 2018, women were allowed to drive the same year, the religious police lost their powers of arrest, and Riyadh Season now brings concerts, comedy, boxing and theme districts to the capital each winter. Older residents and younger ones often describe the same decade very differently.

Architecture carries the local identity. The Najdi manner of thick mud walls, crenellated parapets and triangular openings is quoted by government buildings, the Diplomatic Quarter and the restored lanes of Diriyah, while the towers of Olaya and the financial district state the other half of the city's self-image. Riyadh is also a city of migrants — from Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines — whose languages and food fill the older southern districts.

About seven million people live in Riyadh, making it the largest city in the kingdom; roughly a third are foreign residents. The economy runs on government — ministries, the royal court, the armed forces — together with banks, the head offices of state companies, construction and a growing technology sector, and several large universities. Foreign firms have been moving regional headquarters to the capital, adding to a long building boom.

Families live mostly in villas and apartment blocks in the north and east, in districts such as Al Malaz, Al Nakheel and Hittin, while the older southern quarters around Al-Bathaa are crowded and largely migrant. Life is car-based; the metro's opening in 2024 was the first serious alternative in a city where commuting by private car had been near-universal. Schools and offices start early, the afternoon heat empties the streets, and the evening, after sunset prayer, is when malls, restaurants, parks and cafés fill up and children play outside late.

The talking points are housing costs, traffic, the pace of change under Vision 2030 and the strain on groundwater in the farms around the city. Weekends run Friday and Saturday, and the standard winter outing is a camp in the desert with a fire, coffee and grilled lamb. The regional war that began in late February 2026 has disrupted flights and events.

Kabsa is the dish most associated with the capital: long-grain rice cooked in a broth of lamb or chicken with black lime, cloves, cardamom and cinnamon, served on a communal platter with a tomato-based sauce and eaten with the right hand. Its Yemeni relatives, mandi and madhbi, are just as common in Riyadh's restaurants, the meat cooked in a pit oven or over coals. The older Najdi kitchen is built on wheat rather than rice — jareesh, cracked wheat simmered with meat and topped with fried onion; margoog and matazeez, stews with pieces of dough cooked in the sauce; and qursan, thin dry bread soaked in broth.

Dates are eaten daily and given as gifts, with sukkari from nearby Qassim among the prized varieties, and Arabic coffee, lightly roasted and flavoured with cardamom and sometimes saffron, is poured from a long-spouted dallah into small cups. Laban, a salty buttermilk, is drunk with meals, and camel's milk is sold in supermarkets. Sweets include kleija, a date-filled biscuit of the Najd, and luqaimat, fried dough balls in syrup that appear through Ramadan.

Street food is largely shared with the wider Arab world: shawarma, falafel, grilled meat and the folded stuffed pancake called mutabbaq. Al-Bathaa's migrant kitchens serve Yemeni, Egyptian, Pakistani and Filipino food, and the north of the city has a large speciality coffee scene alongside international chains. Alcohol is prohibited throughout the kingdom.