The Eastern Province

The Gulf coast was part of the ancient world of Dilmun, the trading culture centred on Bahrain, and Tarout island, off Qatif, has been settled for some five thousand years. The great oasis of al-Hasa, now Al-Ahsa, fed towns and caravan routes long before Islam, and its Abd al-Qays tribe was among the first to accept the new faith; the Jawatha mosque near Hofuf is traditionally one of the earliest in Arabia. In the 10th century Al-Ahsa was the base of the Qarmatians, a radical Ismaili movement that raided Mecca in 930 and carried off the Black Stone of the Kaaba for about twenty years.

Later the region was ruled by local dynasties, briefly by the Portuguese at the coast, and by the Ottomans, who held al-Hasa in the 16th and 17th centuries and again from 1871. The Bani Khalid tribe controlled the area in between. Ibn Saud took Hofuf from the Ottomans in 1913, and at Uqair in 1922 British officials drew the borders with Kuwait and Iraq.

In 1938 American geologists struck oil at Dammam Well No. 7 in Dhahran, and the company that became Saudi Aramco built a new world around it: Dhahran's company town, the ports of Ras Tanura and Dammam, and later the industrial city of Jubail. The province's Shia communities have long complained of discrimination, and Qatif saw protests in 2011–12 and the demolition of the old quarter of Awamiyah in 2017.

The Eastern Province looks to the Gulf. Its coastal towns share the culture of Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar — pearling songs, dhow building, seafood and the Gulf dialect — and the King Fahd Causeway makes Bahrain a weekend neighbour. The region is also home to most of the kingdom's Twelver Shia citizens, concentrated in Qatif and Al-Ahsa, where Ashura is observed and mosques and husseiniyas follow their own traditions alongside the Sunni majority.

Aramco has shaped the culture too. Generations of Saudis grew up in or around its compounds, schools and hospitals, and Dhahran's King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals and the Ithra cultural centre make the area a centre of technical education and the arts.

Al-Ahsa has a strong craft tradition, above all the tailoring of the bisht, the fine cloak worn by men on formal occasions, embroidered with gold thread. Pottery, basketry from palm fronds and the weaving of palm products continue in the oasis villages, and the region's poets and musicians are well known in the Gulf.

Dammam, Khobar and Dhahran form a single metropolitan area of well over two million people. Al-Ahsa governorate, around Hofuf and Mubarraz, has over a million people, and Qatif, Jubail, Hafr al-Batin and Khafji are the other main towns.

Oil dominates the economy. Saudi Aramco's headquarters is in Dhahran, the Ghawar field inland is the largest conventional oilfield in the world, and Abqaiq processes much of the kingdom's crude. Jubail's petrochemical plants, the ports of Dammam and Ras Tanura, and the service industries built around them employ large numbers of Saudis and foreign workers. Al-Ahsa's palms and fields still make it an agricultural centre.

Everyday life is suburban and car-based. Evenings are spent on the Corniche, at malls and in cafés, and families picnic on the beaches at Half Moon Bay in the cooler months. Outside the cities, the rhythm of the oasis and of the fishing harbours at Qatif and Dammam carries on.

The Eastern Province eats like the Gulf. Machboos, spiced rice cooked with meat or fish, is the regional version of kabsa, and the Gulf coast is known for grilled and fried fish, especially hamour, a grouper, often served with rice. Shrimp from the Gulf appear in rice dishes and stews. Muhammar, rice sweetened with date molasses and spiced, is often eaten with fish.

Al-Ahsa has two famous products: its dates, especially the khalas, a variety widely grown in eastern Arabia, and Hasawi rice, a reddish grain grown in the oasis. Breakfast in the Gulf style may be balaleet, sweet vermicelli with saffron and cardamom topped with an omelette, and harees, wheat and meat pounded to a porridge, is made for Ramadan and celebrations.

Arabic coffee and tea accompany everything, and the large South Asian and Filipino communities of Khobar and Dammam add biryani, curry and street snacks to the daily menu.

On the coast, Dammam and Al Khobar offer long corniches, the Ithra cultural centre in Dhahran with its layered exhibition halls near the first oil well, and the beaches of Half Moon Bay to the south. Offshore, Tarout Island has its fort built on ancient remains and old stone quarters, and the nearby town of Qatif has a busy fish market.

Inland, the Al-Ahsa oasis around Hofuf is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a landscape of palm groves, springs, canals and old villages. In the town are the Ottoman-era Ibrahim Palace, with its mosque and domes, and the traditional Qaisariya souq. Jabal al-Qarah is a hill of sandstone caves and passages that stay cool in summer, and the Jawatha mosque and the dunes around the Yellow Lake lie nearby. On the coast east of Hofuf is Uqair, an old port with a fort.

South of Al-Ahsa, the land runs into the edge of the Empty Quarter, the Rub' al Khali, with sand dunes stretching towards the Omani and Emirati borders. Guided 4x4 trips reach its dunes and salt flats in winter.