In Hegra, you will encounter a unique piece of history and truly impressive ancient monuments. Hegra is part of the spectacular desert area of the Al Ula region. Hegra was the Nabataeans’ second largest settlement (after Petra in modern-day Jordan). The site is the part of the region where the world-famous rock-cut tombs of the Nabataeans are located, which I will come back to in a moment. Hegra is Saudi Arabia’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site and the largest surviving site of the Nabataean civilisation south of Petra. Today, Hegra is uninhabited and much of the town is still buried under layers of sand.
Hegra is fenced off and can only be visited as part of an official guided tour. The schedule is strictly organised. Unfortunately, it is not possible to stay longer than the booked time frame. There are two tour options: one of them is the bus tour, the other is with a nostalgic Land Rover (for one or up to seven persons). The tour should be booked in good time.
I have written in detail in my ebook ‘SAUDI ARABIA AL ULA’ about the history and people of the Nabataeans, the necropolis and the city of Hegra, the background to their extraordinarily impressive funerary monuments, their design, their façades and portals, the stylistic adaptations of the architecture of that era incorporated into them, the inscriptions on the tombs, and the ownership of the tombs. In this blog post, I can only touch briefly on three of these tomb monuments.
