Riyadh is the capital and largest city of Saudi Arabia. It stands on the eastern bank of Wadi Hanifa on the Najd plateau in the centre of the Arabian Peninsula, at about 600 metres above sea level, and it had 7,009,100 residents in 2022, making it the most populous city on the peninsula. A century ago Riyadh was a walled oasis town of perhaps 18,000 people, with an old core under one square kilometre. The city has been built by a long series of newcomers: oasis farmers, a Najdi dynasty, Bedouin who settled, civil servants moved from Jeddah and, since the 1970s, millions of workers from abroad.
Banu Hanifa Farmers and the Oasis Town of Hajr
The earliest known people at the site were the Banu Hanifa, an Arab tribe credited with founding a town called Hajr there before Islam. Under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, Hajr was the seat of the province of Al-Yamama, whose governors oversaw much of central and eastern Arabia. The province broke away from the Abbasids in 866, the new Banu Ukhaidhir rulers moved their capital to nearby Al-Kharj, and Hajr went into a long decline. When the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta passed through in the fourteenth century, he still called Hajr the main city of Al-Yamama. He described canals and trees and said most of its people were Banu Hanifa, and he travelled on to Mecca for the Hajj with their leader.
Over time the town split into separate farming settlements, the best known being Migrin (Muqrin) and Mi’kal, although the name Hajr survived in local folk poetry. The name Riyadh is first recorded by a seventeenth-century chronicler describing an event of 1590. It is the plural of the Arabic word for garden, and it described the date-palm orchards and cultivated plots of those oasis hamlets. Their water and fertile soil supported dates, other crops and, until pests ruined the harvests, wheat. That was the main business of Riyadh’s people for centuries.
Dahham ibn Dawwas, the House of Saud and the January 1902 Raid on Masmak
The next major arrival came from the village of Manfuhah, just to the south. In the 1730s or 1740s (sources differ on the year) Dahham ibn Dawwas took control of Riyadh, built a mudbrick palace and put a single wall around the separate oases, turning them into one fortified town. That wall created the town that later became the capital.
Diriyah, a few kilometres up Wadi Hanifa, then became the main power in the area. In 1744 the preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab allied with Diriyah’s ruler, Muhammad bin Saud, and their forces fought Ibn Dawwas for three decades until he fled and Riyadh surrendered in 1774. Diriyah remained the capital of this First Saudi State until Ottoman-Egyptian forces sent by Muhammad Ali destroyed it in 1818. When Turki ibn Abdullah rebuilt Saudi rule in the 1820s, he chose Riyadh over the ruined Diriyah, and Riyadh has been the family’s seat most of the time since.
Arrivals were not always friendly. The Al Rashid of Ha’il, from the northern Shammar lands, defeated the Second Saudi State at the Battle of Mulayda on 21 January 1891, and the Saud family went into exile in Kuwait. Al-Masmak, the square fort with corner towers near Deera Square, dates from around 1865 and held the Rashidi garrison. In January 1902 the young Abdulaziz ibn Saud and a small group of companions crossed from Kuwait, took Masmak and recaptured the town. Saudi histories treat that raid as the beginning of the modern kingdom. By 1926 he controlled the Hejaz as well, and in September 1932 he named his state Saudi Arabia, with Riyadh as its capital. The raid is still commemorated in the city. In 1999 King Fahd opened the King Abdulaziz Historical Center, marking the centenary of the 1902 capture with a museum, a library and six parks and gardens, among them a Palm Oasis, and in 2013 the Heroes’ Gate monument on Highway 40 was dedicated to Ibn Saud and his companions.
Bedouin Settlers and Jeddah Civil Servants: The First Boom, 1930s to 1950s
In 1932 the capital was still the old walled town, entered through five gates: Thumaira to the east, Al-Suwailen to the north, Dukhna to the south, Al-Madhbah to the west and Shumaisi to the south-west. Inside were a market square, mosques and courtyard houses of adobe. The first large building outside the walls was the king’s Murabba Palace, begun in 1936. When it was finished in 1938, a household of 800 people moved in.
Two groups of newcomers then changed the city. The first were nomads. Saleh Al Hathloul, a former Saudi deputy minister of town planning, links the expansion of the 1930s to the settling of Bedouin families in and around towns such as Riyadh. The second were bureaucrats. Until the 1950s many government offices were in Jeddah on the Red Sea coast. When ministries moved to Riyadh, the state built the Malaz housing scheme for the transferred officials. Its detached houses on a street grid copied Dammam and Khobar in the Eastern Province, which had in turn copied the company town that Aramco built at Dhahran. A grid for the whole city was adopted in 1953, and King Saud began the royal Annasriyyah district in 1950. The walls came down in the 1950s. The move of officials from Jeddah never reversed. Today 23 of the government’s 24 ministries have their headquarters in Riyadh, together with the Council of Ministers, the Consultative Assembly and the Supreme Judicial Council.
Oil money after the Second World War sped everything up. Riyadh had about 150,000 people by 1960 and about half a million by 1972, the year a master plan by the Greek firm Doxiadis Associates was approved. The plan divided new land into neighbourhood blocks of two by two kilometres, and it underestimated the city’s growth almost at once. Doxiadis had expected an urban area of 304 square kilometres after thirty years, but Riyadh reached 400 square kilometres within four. Between 1974 and 1992 the population grew by an average of 8.2 per cent a year.
Indians, Pakistanis and the 36 Per Cent Who Came From Abroad
That growth could not have happened on Saudi labour alone. The oil boom of the 1970s brought large numbers of foreign workers to build roads, towers and ministries and then to staff them. In 2017, 64.19 per cent of Riyadh’s residents were Saudi citizens and 35.81 per cent were not. The two largest foreign groups came from South Asia: Indians made up 13.7 per cent of the city and Pakistanis 12.4 per cent, between them more than one in four residents.
A different group of foreigners lives in the Diplomatic Quarter on the city’s western edge, which holds most of Riyadh’s 114 embassies. More recently, regional headquarters have brought another wave: more than 500 foreign companies, including Google, Amazon, Samsung, Philips and Lenovo, have moved regional offices to Riyadh. Their staff work in Al-Olaya and along King Fahd Road, where the Kingdom Centre, Al-Faisaliah and the towers of the King Abdullah Financial District stand. The growing skyline is covered in our guide to the tallest building in Riyadh, and the policy behind the corporate move in our overview of the economy of Saudi Arabia.
The city these groups share is spread out. Riyadh is divided into fourteen branch municipalities plus the Diplomatic Quarter, containing more than 130 districts in all. Al-Bat’ha and Al-Deerah, around Masmak and Deera Square, are the oldest parts of the city. Al-Olaya is its commercial centre, and new residential suburbs keep spreading north beyond King Salman Road and east towards Janadriyah, still laid out on the grid first tried at Malaz.
Najdi Arabic, Al-Hilal and Princess Nourah: Who Speaks for Riyadh Today
For all its migrants, Riyadh’s everyday Arabic is its own. Linguists group the city’s speech with Central Najdi, the dialects of the Riyadh region’s towns and farming communities and of the Anazah tribe in the Syrian Desert. The modern urban dialect of Riyadh has become the prestige dialect of Saudi Arabia. One easily noticed feature is the g sound where classical Arabic has q, and another is that the old distinction between the letters ḍād and ẓā’ has merged into a single sound.
Sport gives Riyadh’s communities something in common. Al-Shabab, founded in 1947, Al-Nassr (1955) and Al-Hilal (1957) all play in the city. By Wikipedia’s count Al-Hilal has won 19 Saudi Pro League titles, Al-Nassr 9 and Al-Shabab 6. King Fahd Sports City Stadium, with 70,200 seats, hosted the FIFA Confederations Cup in 1992, 1995 and 1997, and Riyadh is due to host the 2034 Asian Games and Expo 2030.
The biggest recent change is the role of women. Princess Nourah bint Abdul Rahman University, founded in 1970 as a women’s college and granted university status in 2008, is described as the world’s largest university for women. Saudi Arabia’s literacy rate reached 99.38 per cent in 2021. Together with the driverless Riyadh Metro, now the longest system of its kind in the world, these changes point to a capital whose people are still arriving and still changing it. The weather they all live with, 43.6 °C August highs and dust storms that can cut visibility below 10 metres, is covered in our guide to the climate of Saudi Arabia.
Quick Facts About Riyadh
- Country: Saudi Arabia
- Continent: Asia (Middle East)
- Country population: approximately 35.2 million
- Capital city status: Riyadh is the capital of Saudi Arabia, the seat of national government, and the location of foreign embassies, parliament, and the head of state's official residence.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the capital of Saudi Arabia?
The capital of Saudi Arabia is Riyadh. Riyadh is the seat of national government, hosts most foreign embassies and consulates, and is typically where the head of state and parliament are located.
What continent is Riyadh in?
Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, is located in Asia, in the Middle East region. As Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh serves as the country's primary connection to the broader Asian political, economic, and cultural sphere.
Why is Riyadh the capital of Saudi Arabia?
Riyadh was chosen as the capital of Saudi Arabia for reasons that typically combine geography, history, and politics. Capital city selections often reflect a desire for centrality (being accessible from across the country), historical importance (being a longstanding seat of government or culture), or neutrality (being acceptable to multiple regions or ethnic groups within the country). The specific reasons for Riyadh's designation are detailed in the city's history above.
What is Riyadh known for?
As the capital of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh is best known for housing the country's central government institutions — parliament, presidential or royal residences, supreme court, and key ministries. It is also typically a major cultural and economic center within Saudi Arabia, hosting national museums, embassies, and signature monuments. The introduction and history sections above provide detailed coverage of the city's specific notable institutions and landmarks.
Related Pages
- Saudi Arabia Country Guide — full geography, climate, economy, and culture overview
- Flag of Saudi Arabia — meaning, history, and design of Saudi Arabia's national flag