Taif

Taif's advantage has always been its altitude. Sitting nearly 1,900 metres up on a plateau behind the escarpment, it grew as an agricultural oasis of walled gardens and orchards in a region of desert, and as a summer refuge for the people of the hot lowlands. Before Islam it was the home of the Thaqif tribe and a centre of the cult of the goddess Al-Lat, and the annual fair at Ukaz in the valley nearby was the great market and poetry contest of the Arabs, where tribes met under truce to trade and to hear their poets. The Prophet Muhammad came here in 619 seeking support and was rejected; the town accepted Islam a decade later.

Under the caliphates and the later empires Taif was a prosperous garden town and the summer seat of whoever governed the Hejaz, supplying Mecca with fruit, honey and rose water. The Ottomans fortified it; the Sharifs of Mecca kept summer residences here; and in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it changed hands repeatedly between Ottoman, Egyptian and local forces. Ibn Saud's army took the town in 1924, the first of the Hejazi cities to fall, and the Treaty of Taif in 1934 ended the war with Yemen.

In the modern kingdom Taif has kept a particular role. For decades the government moved here in summer, and the city has long hosted military academies and air force facilities. The 1989 talks that produced the Taif Agreement, which ended the Lebanese civil war, were held in the city. The escarpment roads were rebuilt to carry heavy traffic, the airport expanded, and the Souq Okaz festival revived on the site of the old fair.

Taif thinks of itself as a garden city, and the rose is its emblem. Damask roses have been grown in the surrounding hills for centuries; they are picked before dawn in April and distilled the same morning into rose water and rose oil, which is sold across the Muslim world and used by international perfume houses. Rose farms, distilleries and shops are part of the city's self-image in a way no other Saudi city has an equivalent for.

The highlands also carry an older cultural weight. The fair at Ukaz is remembered as the place where pre-Islamic Arabic poetry was judged and where the odes hung at Mecca were said to have been chosen, and the revived summer festival makes deliberate use of that memory with poetry competitions, calligraphy and craft markets. Local traditions include highland dances performed with sticks and swords at weddings and festivals, and the making of silver jewellery and woven goods sold in the souqs.

Socially, Taif is more conservative than Jeddah and more relaxed than the interior, with a strong tradition of hospitality shaped by generations of summer visitors. Extended families keep farms and second houses in Al-Shafa and the surrounding villages, and weekends in the warm months are spent in orchards and on picnic ground outside the city. Modest dress is expected in public, the day pauses for prayer, and coffee with dates opens every visit.

About 560,000 people live in Taif, making it one of the largest cities in the kingdom and the main centre of the mountains behind Mecca. Most live in low villas and apartment blocks spread across the plateau, and the population swells each summer with families who come up from the coast, so that shops, restaurants and hotels work to a strongly seasonal rhythm.

Agriculture remains real here in a way it is not in most of Saudi Arabia: roses, grapes, figs, pomegranates, prickly pears, almonds and honey come off the terraces and orchards of Al-Shafa and the surrounding valleys, and the produce is sold in the city's markets and along the mountain roads. Government offices, universities, hospitals, military installations and the summer tourism trade provide most other employment, and much of the working population commutes within the plateau by car.

Daily life is calmer and cooler than in the lowlands. Mornings are busy in the markets, the afternoon is quiet, and evenings fill the parks, the souqs and the escarpment viewpoints, where families sit out over the drop as the temperature falls. The weekend is Friday and Saturday. Current pressures include water supply for the farms, the spread of new housing over agricultural land, traffic on the escarpment roads, and the seasonal strain that summer visitors place on the city's services.

Taif's kitchen is Hejazi with a highland accent. Saleeg, rice simmered slowly in meat broth and milk until it turns creamy and served with a whole chicken and a little clarified butter, is the dish most tightly linked to the city and its surroundings, and is a standard of family and restaurant tables alike. Kabsa, spiced rice with lamb or chicken, mandi cooked in a pit oven, and grilled meats fill out the menus, while breakfast is ful — fava beans stewed with cumin — with flatbread baked against the wall of a clay oven.

The produce is what sets Taif apart. Orchards in the hills yield pomegranates, figs, grapes, apricots and prickly pears, sold from roadside stalls in late summer and used in preserves and juices. Mountain honey is a serious business, with sidr honey from jujube blossom the most prized and sold by weight in specialist shops. Almonds, walnuts and dried fruit appear in sweets, and the markets sell spices for the whole region.

Rose water runs through everything sweet. It is stirred into Arabic coffee, which is lightly roasted, spiced with cardamom and poured from a long-spouted dallah into small cups with dates alongside; it flavours kunafa, basbousa, ma'amoul and milk puddings; and it is sold in bottles as a souvenir. Tea is drunk very sweet, often with mint. Alcohol is illegal in the kingdom, so the social evening is built around coffee houses, juice stands and long meals shared from a single platter.