Facts about Saudi Arabia
Capital Riyadh · Asia
10 topics · 20 lessons · about 20 minutes
Saudi Arabia covers most of the Arabian Peninsula and is the only country with coastline on both the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. It holds Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam, and it has spent the years since 2016 trying to build an economy that does not depend on the oil found under its Eastern Province in 1938.
Thirteen provinces divide a country of about 2.15 million square kilometers, the fifth largest in Asia. The Hejaz runs down the Red Sea coast and holds Mecca, Medina and the port of Jeddah. The Najd is the central plateau, with Riyadh at its heart. The Eastern Province along the Gulf sits above the oil fields and is the most religiously mixed part of the kingdom. In the southwest the Asir mountains rise above 3,000 meters into terraced farmland and summer cloud, which is why Saudis go there to escape the heat rather than to find it.
Riyadh has passed seven million people and Jeddah is the main gateway for pilgrims arriving by air. The southern third of the country is the Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter, the largest continuous sand desert on Earth. Tourism was closed to non-pilgrims until 2019; the visitor sites now being promoted hardest are the Nabataean tombs at Hegra in Al-Ula, the mud-brick quarter at Diriyah outside Riyadh, and the Red Sea reefs.
- Population
- 35.3 million
- Area
- 2,149,690 km²
- Currency
- Saudi riyal (﷼)
- Official language
- Arabic
- Provinces
- 13
- Highest point
- Jabal Sawda, 3,015 m
The Saudi Arabia course
Geography of Saudi Arabia2 lessons
Two coasts, the largest sand desert on Earth, and not one permanent river.
History of Saudi Arabia2 lessons
Nabataean tomb builders, the founding of Islam, and a kingdom proclaimed in 1932.
Language of Saudi Arabia2 lessons
A written standard nobody speaks at home, and roots that bend into whole word families.
Culture of Saudi Arabia2 lessons
Coffee, dates and the ardah sword dance, in a decade of unusually fast social change.
Economy of Saudi Arabia2 lessons
The world’s largest crude reserves, and a state fund spending them on something else.
Politics of Saudi Arabia2 lessons
An absolute monarchy with no elected legislature, and power concentrated in one generation.
Nature & Wildlife of Saudi Arabia2 lessons
An antelope brought back from extinction in the wild, and reefs that shrug off heat.
Food & Cuisine of Saudi Arabia2 lessons
Kabsa from the shared platter, coffee with cardamom, and dates by the hundreds of varieties.
Landmarks of Saudi Arabia2 lessons
The largest mosque in the world, tombs carved for the Nabataean dead, and mud-brick Diriyah.
People & Society of Saudi Arabia2 lessons
A population that quadrupled in fifty years, four in ten of them foreign nationals.
Geography of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia occupies the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, bordered by Jordan, Iraq and Kuwait in the north, Yemen and Oman in the south, and the Gulf states in the east. It is the only country with a coastline on both the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, which is why it appears in shipping and pipeline arguments that have nothing to do with its own trade.
The Rub al Khali in the south covers roughly 650,000 square kilometers and is the largest continuous body of sand in the world. The Asir mountains in the southwest catch enough monsoon moisture to support terraced agriculture, and Jabal Sawda at an officially recognized 3,015 meters is the high point. There is no permanent river or natural lake anywhere in the country, so water comes from fossil aquifers and from desalination plants that supply more of it than any other nation produces.
History of Saudi Arabia
The Nabataeans cut monumental tombs into sandstone outcrops at Hegra in the first century, the southern counterpart to their capital at Petra. Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 and his migration to Medina in 622 sets the start of the Islamic calendar, after which Arab armies carried the new religion across the Middle East and North Africa within a century.
The first Saudi state grew out of an alliance struck at Diriyah in 1744 between the local ruler Muhammad ibn Saud and the religious reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Ottoman-backed forces destroyed it in 1818 and a second state also failed. Abdulaziz Ibn Saud retook Riyadh in 1902 and spent three decades reassembling the territory, proclaiming the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. Oil was struck at Dammam No. 7 in 1938, six years later.
Language of Saudi Arabia
Arabic is the sole official language, written right to left in an alphabet of 28 letters that mostly marks consonants and leaves short vowels to context. Words are built from three-consonant roots run through fixed patterns, so k-t-b yields the words for book, writer, office and library in a way a learner can predict once the system clicks.
Modern Standard Arabic is the language of news, law and formal writing across the Arab world, but nobody grows up speaking it. Saudis speak regional dialects instead, chiefly Najdi in the center and Hejazi in the west, and these differ enough from the standard to count as separate registers rather than accents. Around 40 percent of residents are foreign nationals, so Urdu, Tagalog, Bengali and Malayalam are heard constantly in the cities.
Culture of Saudi Arabia
Islam shapes daily life more visibly here than anywhere else, with the two holiest cities under Saudi custodianship and the king titled Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. Hospitality follows a fixed sequence of bitter cardamom-scented qahwa poured from a dallah and served with dates, and the ardah, a line dance performed with swords and drums, carries UNESCO heritage listing.
The past decade has moved faster than the previous fifty. The religious police lost their powers of arrest in 2016, cinemas reopened in 2018 after a 35-year ban, women were permitted to drive that June, and male guardianship rules were loosened enough for women to travel and hold passports independently. Concerts and mixed public events are now routine. How deep the change runs is contested, and it has arrived alongside sharper limits on dissent rather than looser ones.
Economy of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Aramco holds the largest proven crude oil reserves of any company, more than 270 billion barrels, and its 2019 listing briefly made it the most valuable public company in the world. Saudi Arabia was a founding member of OPEC in 1960 and its spare production capacity gives it more influence over the oil price than any other producer.
Vision 2030, launched in 2016, is the attempt to spend that income on an economy that will outlast it. The Public Investment Fund channels it into tourism, entertainment, mining, sport and giant construction projects, of which the linear city NEOM is the best known and the least finished. Tourist visas opened to non-pilgrims in 2019. The obstacle is not capital but jobs: most private-sector work is still done by foreign nationals, and moving Saudis into it is the harder half of the plan.
Politics of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. The Basic Law of 1992 sets out how the state works but names the Quran and the Sunnah as the constitution, and there is no elected national legislature and no legal political party. The Consultative Assembly, or Majlis ash-Shura, has 150 members appointed by the king; it can propose legislation but not pass it.
King Salman has reigned since 2015, and his son Mohammed bin Salman has been crown prince since 2017 and prime minister since 2022, holding day-to-day authority. Succession runs through the sons and now grandsons of the founder Abdulaziz rather than by primogeniture. Municipal councils are the only elected bodies, and women first voted and stood in them in 2015. Each of the 13 provinces is run by an appointed governor.
Nature & Wildlife of Saudi Arabia
The Arabian oryx, the national animal, was hunted out of the wild by the early 1970s and survives only because zoos and private collections held enough of them to start reintroductions from 1980. It now ranges again in protected areas. The Arabian leopard is in worse shape, reduced to a few dozen animals, with a captive breeding program in Al-Ula trying to reverse that.
Deserts hold the sand cat, the Arabian wolf, the Nubian ibex on cliff ground and gazelle on the plains. The Red Sea reefs are the interesting case: their corals tolerate heat that bleaches reefs elsewhere, which has made them a research site for what warmer oceans will leave behind. Wadis flood briefly after rain and dry within days, and the country sits under a migration corridor between Africa and Eurasia used by storks and raptors twice a year.
Food & Cuisine of Saudi Arabia
Kabsa is the dish most often called national: long-grain rice cooked with lamb or chicken, tomato, dried lime and a warm spice mix, served on a wide communal platter that people eat from with the right hand. Mandi cooks the meat in a pit below the rice, jareesh grinds wheat into a savory porridge, and mutabbaq is a stuffed pastry folded and griddled for street eating.
Dates are grown in hundreds of varieties and eaten daily rather than as a treat, and Arabic coffee with dates was inscribed by UNESCO in 2015 as a symbol of generosity. Regional cooking splits along old trade lines: Hejazi food in the west absorbed centuries of pilgrim traffic from Egypt, Turkey and South Asia, while the Gulf coast leans on fish and rice. Alcohol is prohibited outright, and pork with it.
Landmarks of Saudi Arabia
Masjid al-Haram in Mecca surrounds the Kaaba and is the largest mosque in the world, built to hold well over a million worshippers at once. Millions perform the hajj each year during a fixed few days, and many more come for the lesser umrah pilgrimage, which can be made at any time. The Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, where Muhammad is buried, is the second holiest site in Islam.
Hegra in Al-Ula became the country’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008: more than a hundred tombs cut into sandstone by the Nabataeans, the largest of them Qasr al-Farid, left unfinished and standing alone. The At-Turaif district at Diriyah, mud-brick and UNESCO listed in 2010, is where the first Saudi state was governed. Northwest of Riyadh the Tuwaiq escarpment breaks off in a cliff that locals call the Edge of the World.
People & Society of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia had around 35.3 million residents in 2024, up from under 10 million in the mid-1970s, and roughly 41 percent of them are foreign nationals. Most arrive on employment contracts from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Yemen and the Philippines, and the kafala sponsorship system that ties a worker to an employer has been loosened in stages since 2021 without being abolished.
The citizen population is young, with a national median age around 30, and it is overwhelmingly urban after a settlement drive that ended most Bedouin nomadism within living memory. Fertility has fallen from more than seven births per woman in the 1980s to below replacement level. Women now make up a growing share of the workforce, a shift that began in earnest only in the past decade.
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