ASIR: If Rijal Almaa, a stone village tucked into a fold of the Kingdom’s southern mountains, showcases the polished end-point of new efforts to preserve cultural heritage, the hamlet of Watan Emsoudah represents the difficulties faced.

Its low-covered alleyways lie thick with the debris of decades of abandonment, some stone house roofs have caved in and thistles grow high between the hamlet’s walls, but near the entrance three men are working to save a house.

Under the National Transformation Program unveiled this month, the Kingdom has allocated nearly $1 billion to preserve its heritage, but saving cultural treasures will prove complex and expensive.

“For maybe 40 years we stopped using these old houses and every five years you need to rehabilitate them,” said Abdul Aziz Al-Ghanem, representative of Asir’s architectural heritage center at the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (SCTNH). “I hope we get more money. We need it.”

Watan Emsoudah is one of around 4,000 old villages in Asir and the project to restore it to save architectural tradition and boost tourism is one of eight in the region by a local investor.

Rehabilitating the village, swaddled by terraced fields in a shallow bowl on a mountain plateau, will cost around SR6 million, says Ibrahim Al-Almiy, a former history teacher and the local investor behind these projects.

The towns along the Red Sea coast and the southern highlands contain some fine buildings in their historic old quarters.

In a bid to end reliance on oil, the Kingdom is investing in tourism, aiming to increase spending by Saudis at home instead of on holidays abroad.

Encouraging visits to local places of beauty or interest is a key Vision 2030 goal and the Kingdom has some world-class sites, some in remote areas, which are all but unknown outside the Kingdom.

The spectacular rock-hewn Nabatean tombs of Madain Saleh, the ornate facades of Jeddah’s coral-built old town and the ancient rock art hidden among the boulders of the northern deserts constitute an inheritance unique to the Kingdom.

— REUTERS