Diriyah is spending $63 billion on the one thing money can’t buy
Author
Doug Merry
Length
Medium
“Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.” — Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961
Saudi Arabia is spending sixty-three billion dollars to build something it already owns.
The place is called Diriyah, on the north-western edge of Riyadh. At its centre sits At-Turaif, a mud-brick citadel that was the seat of the first Saudi state, founded in 1727. UNESCO put it on the World Heritage list in 2010. It is, in the most literal sense, the birthplace of the country. It has stood, in one condition or another, for three hundred years.
And now it is the heart of one of the largest cultural developments on earth.
That is the part worth pausing on. Because almost everything being built around At-Turaif can be bought. The one thing in the middle cannot.
What Diriyah actually is
Diriyah Company, owned by the Public Investment Fund, is delivering a giga-project worth around $63.2 billion, targeted to be ready for the World Expo in 2030. The ambition is enormous: roughly 100,000 residents and tens of millions of visits a year once it matures, with more than $27 billion of contracts already awarded.
Some of it is already open. Bujairi Terrace, a dining district of more than twenty restaurants looking straight out over the At-Turaif ruins, opened at the end of 2022. Luxury hotels — The Langham, The Chedi Wadi Safar — are due to welcome their first guests this year. Right now, until the end of September 2026, entry to Diriyah and Bujairi Terrace is free, which tells you the operators want footfall and want the habit to form early.
Strip away the scale and the plan is clear enough. Take a genuine piece of national memory and build a world-class destination around it. On paper, it is unarguable. In practice, it is the hardest brief in the region.
The one thing money can’t buy
To see why, look at what sits an hour south. Six Flags Qiddiya City opened on the last day of 2025, complete with Falcon’s Flight, billed as the world’s tallest and fastest roller coaster. It is spectacular, and it is instructive. Because spectacle is something you can order. Enough money buys you the tallest ride, the biggest screen, the longest queue. It is an engineering problem with a price tag attached.
Heritage is not like that. Heritage is the one asset you can only inherit, protect, or counterfeit. You cannot manufacture three hundred years. You cannot pour age. Diriyah has inherited the real thing, which puts it in a category Qiddiya can never enter — and hands it a risk Qiddiya never has to face. Get the coaster wrong and you rebuild the coaster. Get the heritage wrong and you have quietly replaced the very thing people came to feel.
The theme-park trap
Here is the trap, and it is set precisely for people with good intentions and large budgets.
The instinct, when you restore something precious, is to improve it. To straighten the wall. To light every corner. To smooth the mud-brick until it photographs beautifully. To put a plaque on everything and a gift shop at the end. Each decision is reasonable on its own. Together, they sand the roughness off the thing until what is left is a very convincing model of a heritage site, standing where a heritage site used to be.
I have walked through both kinds of place. I have stood in old quarters that were still lived-in — uneven, worn, a little inconvenient — and felt the weight of the years in my chest before I could have told you why. And I have stood in flawless reconstructions, everything explained and polished and safe, and felt precisely nothing. Same era, same architecture, same story on the panels. The difference was not budget. The reconstruction usually cost more. The difference was that one had been protected and the other had been perfected.
Perfection is the enemy here. The grain is the point.
The turn
So the risk with Diriyah is not the one the sceptics reach for.
It is not that a $63 billion project will underwhelm. With this money and this ambition, it will not. The renders are gorgeous, the restaurants are full, the hotels will be magnificent. The risk is the opposite. The risk is that it works too smoothly — that it becomes so comfortable, so curated, so effortlessly Instagrammable that it quietly buries the awkward, un-designed, genuinely old thing it was built to honour. You can lose a heritage site by neglecting it. You can also lose it by loving it too tidily.
That is the failure nobody sees coming, because every step towards it looks like an upgrade.
What good heritage work actually protects
If you are shaping anything that trades on authenticity — a birthplace, a founding story, a brand with real history behind it — the temptation is always to add. Add polish, add signage, add another layer of production. It feels like progress and it reads well in a steering meeting.
The harder discipline, and the rarer one, is subtraction. Knowing what not to touch. Leaving the wall a little crooked. Resisting the urge to explain the feeling before the visitor has had the chance to have it. Trusting that three hundred years can speak for themselves if you simply get out of their way.
Diriyah has the one ingredient no amount of money could ever conjure. The whole job — the entire, quiet, unglamorous job — is not to accidentally build over it.
Diriyah in brief
What is Diriyah and why does it matter?
Diriyah is a historic town on the edge of Riyadh, home to At-Turaif — the mud-brick seat of the first Saudi state, founded in 1727 and named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010. It is the birthplace of Saudi Arabia, now at the centre of a $63.2 billion giga-project led by Diriyah Company under Vision 2030.
What is being built at Diriyah Gate?
A large cultural and lifestyle destination around the heritage core: restored heritage areas, museums, hotels, residences and the Bujairi Terrace dining district, which already overlooks the At-Turaif ruins. The wider project targets around 100,000 residents and tens of millions of annual visits, aimed to be ready for the World Expo in 2030.
How is Diriyah different from Qiddiya?
Qiddiya is built around new, buyable spectacle — theme parks and record-breaking rides such as Six Flags Qiddiya City. Diriyah is built around inherited heritage that cannot be manufactured. That makes Diriyah’s central asset far harder to create, and far easier to damage through over-restoration.
What is the biggest risk for a heritage-led development like Diriyah?
Over-polishing. The danger is not that the project underwhelms but that it perfects the site into a themed backdrop, smoothing away the age and roughness that made the place feel real. Good heritage experience design protects the original grain rather than replacing it.
“Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.” — Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961
Saudi Arabia is spending sixty-three billion dollars to build something it already owns.
The place is called Diriyah, on the north-western edge of Riyadh. At its centre sits At-Turaif, a mud-brick citadel that was the seat of the first Saudi state, founded in 1727. UNESCO put it on the World Heritage list in 2010. It is, in the most literal sense, the birthplace of the country. It has stood, in one condition or another, for three hundred years.
And now it is the heart of one of the largest cultural developments on earth.
That is the part worth pausing on. Because almost everything being built around At-Turaif can be bought. The one thing in the middle cannot.
What Diriyah actually is
Diriyah Company, owned by the Public Investment Fund, is delivering a giga-project worth around $63.2 billion, targeted to be ready for the World Expo in 2030. The ambition is enormous: roughly 100,000 residents and tens of millions of visits a year once it matures, with more than $27 billion of contracts already awarded.
Some of it is already open. Bujairi Terrace, a dining district of more than twenty restaurants looking straight out over the At-Turaif ruins, opened at the end of 2022. Luxury hotels — The Langham, The Chedi Wadi Safar — are due to welcome their first guests this year. Right now, until the end of September 2026, entry to Diriyah and Bujairi Terrace is free, which tells you the operators want footfall and want the habit to form early.
Strip away the scale and the plan is clear enough. Take a genuine piece of national memory and build a world-class destination around it. On paper, it is unarguable. In practice, it is the hardest brief in the region.
The one thing money can’t buy
To see why, look at what sits an hour south. Six Flags Qiddiya City opened on the last day of 2025, complete with Falcon’s Flight, billed as the world’s tallest and fastest roller coaster. It is spectacular, and it is instructive. Because spectacle is something you can order. Enough money buys you the tallest ride, the biggest screen, the longest queue. It is an engineering problem with a price tag attached.
Heritage is not like that. Heritage is the one asset you can only inherit, protect, or counterfeit. You cannot manufacture three hundred years. You cannot pour age. Diriyah has inherited the real thing, which puts it in a category Qiddiya can never enter — and hands it a risk Qiddiya never has to face. Get the coaster wrong and you rebuild the coaster. Get the heritage wrong and you have quietly replaced the very thing people came to feel.
The theme-park trap
Here is the trap, and it is set precisely for people with good intentions and large budgets.
The instinct, when you restore something precious, is to improve it. To straighten the wall. To light every corner. To smooth the mud-brick until it photographs beautifully. To put a plaque on everything and a gift shop at the end. Each decision is reasonable on its own. Together, they sand the roughness off the thing until what is left is a very convincing model of a heritage site, standing where a heritage site used to be.
I have walked through both kinds of place. I have stood in old quarters that were still lived-in — uneven, worn, a little inconvenient — and felt the weight of the years in my chest before I could have told you why. And I have stood in flawless reconstructions, everything explained and polished and safe, and felt precisely nothing. Same era, same architecture, same story on the panels. The difference was not budget. The reconstruction usually cost more. The difference was that one had been protected and the other had been perfected.
Perfection is the enemy here. The grain is the point.
The turn
So the risk with Diriyah is not the one the sceptics reach for.
It is not that a $63 billion project will underwhelm. With this money and this ambition, it will not. The renders are gorgeous, the restaurants are full, the hotels will be magnificent. The risk is the opposite. The risk is that it works too smoothly — that it becomes so comfortable, so curated, so effortlessly Instagrammable that it quietly buries the awkward, un-designed, genuinely old thing it was built to honour. You can lose a heritage site by neglecting it. You can also lose it by loving it too tidily.
That is the failure nobody sees coming, because every step towards it looks like an upgrade.
What good heritage work actually protects
If you are shaping anything that trades on authenticity — a birthplace, a founding story, a brand with real history behind it — the temptation is always to add. Add polish, add signage, add another layer of production. It feels like progress and it reads well in a steering meeting.
The harder discipline, and the rarer one, is subtraction. Knowing what not to touch. Leaving the wall a little crooked. Resisting the urge to explain the feeling before the visitor has had the chance to have it. Trusting that three hundred years can speak for themselves if you simply get out of their way.
Diriyah has the one ingredient no amount of money could ever conjure. The whole job — the entire, quiet, unglamorous job — is not to accidentally build over it.
Diriyah in brief
What is Diriyah and why does it matter?
Diriyah is a historic town on the edge of Riyadh, home to At-Turaif — the mud-brick seat of the first Saudi state, founded in 1727 and named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010. It is the birthplace of Saudi Arabia, now at the centre of a $63.2 billion giga-project led by Diriyah Company under Vision 2030.
What is being built at Diriyah Gate?
A large cultural and lifestyle destination around the heritage core: restored heritage areas, museums, hotels, residences and the Bujairi Terrace dining district, which already overlooks the At-Turaif ruins. The wider project targets around 100,000 residents and tens of millions of annual visits, aimed to be ready for the World Expo in 2030.
How is Diriyah different from Qiddiya?
Qiddiya is built around new, buyable spectacle — theme parks and record-breaking rides such as Six Flags Qiddiya City. Diriyah is built around inherited heritage that cannot be manufactured. That makes Diriyah’s central asset far harder to create, and far easier to damage through over-restoration.
What is the biggest risk for a heritage-led development like Diriyah?
Over-polishing. The danger is not that the project underwhelms but that it perfects the site into a themed backdrop, smoothing away the age and roughness that made the place feel real. Good heritage experience design protects the original grain rather than replacing it.