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Indiana Jones’ Petra has a worthy rival in Hegra, Saudi Arabia

With none of the crowds but much of the mystique of Jordan’s Petra facades, Hegra is a history-rich highlight in newly accessible Saudi Arabia

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A Saudi man walks in front of tombs in the al-Hijr archaeological site at Hegra, also known as Mada’in Saleh. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 1:15pm, 10 Feb 2025Updated: 3:29pm, 10 Feb 2025

In 1845, theologian John William Burgon wrote one of the most quoted lines in English poetry: “Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime, a rose-red city half as old as time.”

Petra, his only poem, was written in homage to the well-hidden labyrinth of rock-cut tombs, temples and monuments that was the capital of the 3rd century BC-1st century AD Nabataean kingdom, and whose remains lie in modern-day Jordan.

Few images are more striking than that of the ornate pink two-storey frontage of the tomb known as the Treasury, seen cropped by the dark slit of the Siq, the narrow waterworn passage through which it is approached. It’s a view familiar to many from the climax of the 1989 film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Similar to those in Petra, Jordan, Hegra in Saudi Arabia features dramatic, naturally eroded passageways through cliffs. Photo: Getty Images

But Burgon would have needed only to look 500km south, across the border with Saudi Arabia, to find a match for Petra. Here, relatively undiscovered Hegra, the Nabataeans’ second city, stands at a point where trade routes met.

It offers the same ornately carved cliffs, just as cheerfully pink, cut into imposing multicultural classical frontages around 2,000 years ago. But having opened for non-resident foreigners only in 2020, Saudi Arabia’s first Unesco World Heritage-listed site still sees just a fraction of Petra’s crowds.

The base for a visit to Hegra is the small town of AlUla, about four hours’ drive across the desert north from Madinah – less if showing a typical Saudi indifference to speed limits.

The road occasionally winds over higher ground but otherwise passes through flat, featureless aridity, the occasional tiny settlement seeming to have little point beyond serving food or fuel to passing traffic, or making a small mosque available to those on the road during Muslim prayers, five times daily.

The drive parallels the former route of the Hejaz railway from Damascus, to whose destruction T.E. Lawrence (commonly known as Lawrence of Arabia) dedicated himself during the Arab insurgency against Turkish rule in World War I. David Lean’s 1962 biopic fails to mention that the line’s original purpose was to take pilgrims to Mecca, although it was never completed.