Riyadh — Mubasher: In an effort to boost Saudi Arabia’s tourism sector, the Royal Commission for the Governorate of Al-Ula launched the Winter at Tantora cultural festival.
Kicked off on 20 December 2018 and set to wrap up on 9 February, the festival marks the latest music carnival in the “Islamic kingdom, where such events were unheard of just two years ago,” French news agency AFP reported.
During a slew of themed weekend events, festival visitors would be able to enjoy a range of activities including a celebration of the winter planting season and weekly cultural events, the governorate previously said.
International artists, including Lebanese singer Majida El Roumi and French classical violinist Renaud Capucon, have participated in the main events of the Saudi music carnival.
The Al-Ula governorate is deemed an open-air museum, where Nabatean tombs and art are chiseled into caramel-hued rock, AFP added.
“Saudi Arabia is turning a new page,” Saudi banker Zainab al-Kadadi, who attended a musical weekend that also comprised sand dune bashing and a tour of an Ottoman-era train station told the Paris-based news agency.
The festival is regarded “a soft opening” of Al-Ula, which is considered a main archeological site in the north of the Arabian Peninsula and the meeting point of many past civilisations, as the conservative Gulf nation seeks to open up to international tourists, AFP said.
Saudi Arabia “has great tourism potential, but after what happened [ referring to the killing of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi] it's hard to come here and say 'Everything is wow, everything is amazing',” a Westerner, who was among a group of global social media influencers invited by the kingdom for an all-expenses-paid trip to Al-Ula, told AFP.
The Saudi governorate is at pains to build tourism industry, which is the mainstay of its scheme to wean the oil-rich kingdom off petrodollars.
