The Port of Jeddah, officially Jeddah Islamic Port, is Saudi Arabia’s principal Red Sea port and its busiest container port, on the Red Sea coast of the Hejaz about 65 km west of Mecca. It handled 5.59 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) of containers in 2023, ranking 32nd in the world in Lloyd’s List figures, second only to Dubai’s Jebel Ali among the container ports of the Middle East that year. Jeddah has served as the port of Mecca since about 647 CE, when the Caliph Uthman ibn Affan chose it over the older anchorage of Al Shoaib to the south-west of Mecca. Today it has 62 berths on 11.2 km of quay, and about 65% of Saudi Arabia’s seaborne imports pass through it. For fourteen centuries it has been shaped by the people who used it: pilgrims, merchants, dockworkers and the 3.75 million residents counted in Jeddah in 2022, who live with both its rewards and its costs.
Caliph Uthman’s Choice in 647 and the Pilgrims Who Followed
Jeddah was a fishing and trading settlement long before Islam; the Saudi Ministry of Hajj describes it as more than 2,500 years old. Its rise began with a decision about people. Around 647, Uthman, the third caliph, designated Jeddah as the landing place for travellers to Mecca, and from then on it was the main gate for Muslims arriving by sea for the Hajj. Under the Umayyads, who ruled the Hejaz from 661 to 750, it remained a key civilian harbour, serving fishermen as well as pilgrims travelling to the Hajj by sea.
That traffic made Jeddah a target. In 702 pirates from the Kingdom of Aksum briefly occupied it. After Vasco da Gama opened the sea route round Africa in 1497–98, Portuguese fleets attacked ships carrying cargo and pilgrims from India to the Red Sea, and the Mamluk governor Hussein the Kurd fortified Jeddah with a wall built by forced labour. The Ottomans rebuilt it in 1525 after the Portuguese siege of 1517, adding six watchtowers and gates including the Gate of Mecca to the east and the Gate of Al-Magharibah facing the harbour. The Portuguese attacked again in 1541 and were driven off.
The Merchants of Al-Balad and Their Coral-Stone Houses
Inside those walls, the district now called Al-Balad grew rich on the port’s twin trades. In the nineteenth century Jeddah exported mother-of-pearl, tortoiseshell, frankincense and spices, and much of what it imported was destined for Suez, Africa or Europe. The mercantile families who handled that trade built tower houses in the late nineteenth century, combining the Red Sea tradition of building in coral stone with carved wooden roshan windows and latticed mashrabiya screens.
The people of the port did not always prosper together. On 15 June 1858 rioting in the city killed 25 Christians, including the British and French consuls, and the British frigate HMS Cyclops, anchored offshore, bombarded Jeddah for two days in reprisal. Political control changed hands repeatedly. Forces from Nejd took Jeddah from the Ottomans in 1802, Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt retook it at the Battle of Jeddah in 1813, and the Kingdom of Hejaz, declared by Sharif Hussein during the First World War, lost Jeddah to Ibn Saud in December 1925.
The oil boom of the 1970s and 1980s then drained the old quarter of many of its families. Wealthier families moved north, away from narrow streets that could not take large cars, and poorer migrant workers moved into the old houses. The city walls had already been pulled down in 1947. Preservation efforts began in the 1970s, a preservation society was founded in 1991 and received 4 million US dollars in 2002, and in 2014 Al-Balad was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. In May 2019 Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced the restoration of 56 historic buildings, with a first stage worth 13.3 million US dollars.
From Steamships to the Hajj Terminal: How Pilgrims Left the Quays
For most of history the Hajj was mainly an overland journey by camel, with Jeddah’s harbour serving those who came by sea. After the 1850s steamships made the sea route cheaper and faster, and the number of pilgrims arriving by ship rose sharply. That changed in the twentieth century. Egypt introduced the first airline service for Hajj pilgrims in 1937, Jeddah’s first airport opened as a military airstrip in 1939 and was formally inaugurated for civil use on 14 October 1952, and air travel gradually came to dominate.
Today the pilgrims who once filled the quays of Jeddah Islamic Port land instead at King Abdulaziz International Airport, whose dedicated Hajj Terminal is designed for enormous seasonal crowds, and many travel on to Mecca and Medina by the Haramain High Speed Railway. The port’s role shifted from people to goods, while the city it created kept growing: the 2022 census counted 3,751,722 residents in Jeddah, the second-largest city in Saudi Arabia after Riyadh.
62 Berths and 5.6 Million TEU: Who Runs the Port Today
The modern port is supervised by the Saudi Ports Authority, known as Mawani, founded in 1976 to bring all the kingdom’s ports under one office. Mawani oversees about ten major ports, among them King Abdulaziz Port in Dammam, the King Fahd Industrial Ports at Yanbu and Jubail, Jazan and the new NEOM port, but Jeddah remains the principal port on the Red Sea coast. Over time the actual operation of terminals was contracted out to private companies. One of the first was Dubai Ports International, founded in 1999, whose first project was the South Container Terminal at Jeddah, developed with a local partner; the company later merged into DP World.
The port covers about 12 km². Its 62 berths provide 11.2 km of deep-water quays with a maximum draft of 16 m, enough for container ships of up to 19,800 TEU. Container traffic has grown steadily in recent years, from 3.96 million TEU in 2016 to 5.59 million in 2023, an increase of about 41% in seven years. To improve operating efficiency, three new ship-to-shore cranes have been added to the container quays.
The people who gain most directly are importers and consumers across the west of the kingdom: the port handles about 65% of Saudi Arabia’s imports by sea and is the principal port for the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Jeddah is also meant to be the western end of the Saudi Landbridge, a freight line planned to run about 950 km to Riyadh, where it would join the existing railway to Dammam on the Gulf. The government approved it as a state project in October 2011 at a cost of up to 7 billion US dollars. Design contracts followed in 2013 and 2015, and another went to the Spanish firm Typsa in April 2026, but no plan for construction has yet been announced.
Who Pays for Jeddah’s Growth: Sewage, Floods, Evictions and War at Sea
Sewage, Floods and the South Jeddah Demolitions of 2021
The costs of growth fall on the same city. Jeddah’s sewer network has hardly been expanded as the population has risen; some untreated sewage is discharged directly into the sea, the entire northern part of the city relies on septic tanks and tanker trucks, and Wikipedia notes that a water treatment plant and the seaport both contribute to water pollution along the coast. Air pollution from the industrial zones at the northern and southern ends of the city is a further problem.
The coastal plain floods too. On 25 November 2009 flash floods across Makkah Province killed at least 77 people in and around Jeddah, with more than 350 missing and about 3,000 vehicles swept away or damaged; worse rainfall followed on 26 January 2011. A storm drainage system was built in south Jeddah later in 2011.
A different kind of cost was borne by residents of the south. From October 2021 Saudi authorities demolished homes in more than 60 neighbourhoods to make way for the Jeddah Central Project, part of the Vision 2030 programme, affecting about 558,000 people. Amnesty International reported that some residents received as little as 24 hours’ notice. State media described the districts as crime-ridden and largely home to undocumented migrants, and a compensation scheme announced in January 2022 covered 47% of those evicted.
The Red Sea Crisis of 2023–24
Jeddah’s position halfway along the Red Sea, on the route between the Suez Canal and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, is its advantage and its exposure. From late 2023, Houthi attacks on merchant ships near Bab-el-Mandeb led shipping lines including MSC, Maersk, CMA CGM, COSCO, Hapag-Lloyd and Evergreen to suspend Red Sea voyages. The US Defense Intelligence Agency reported a 90% fall in container shipping through the Red Sea between December 2023 and February 2024, and ships diverted round the Cape of Good Hope faced about ten extra days at sea and roughly a million US dollars in added fuel per voyage. Egypt’s Suez Canal revenue fell from about 9.4 billion US dollars to 7.2 billion in the 2023–24 financial year. Wikipedia’s port tables do not yet give a 2024 figure for Jeddah, so the crisis’s effect on its own throughput is not recorded there.
For the wider setting, see our guides to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal trade route, and for the kingdom’s broader picture, the overview of Saudi Arabia’s economy, in which Jeddah’s port remains the busiest link to the sea on the western coast.