Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Asia Occidental
Desert · Ancient · Opulent
Saudi Arabia levies 0% income tax and is home to Aramco, the world's most valuable company at over $2 trillion.
Más allá de la capital, las principales ciudades son Jeddah, Mecca, Medina — cada una un centro de cultura regional, economía e historia. Riyadh's transformation from a small walled oasis town into a 7-million-person metropolitan sprawl occurred almost entirely between 1950 and 2000, funded by oil revenues that produced the Kingdom Centre tower's sky bridge and a skyline assembled with unusual speed from global architectural catalogues.
El idioma oficial es árabe, que refleja el patrimonio cultural del país y lo conecta con una amplia comunidad internacional. Internacionalmente, Arabia Saudí se contacta mediante el código +966. Saudi hospitality centres on the ritual of Arabic coffee, qahwa — brewed with cardamom and saffron and poured from a long-spouted dallah — which a host refills continuously until the guest signals sufficiency by tilting the cup, an exchange with specific social grammar that predates oil wealth by centuries.
Arabia Saudí comparte sus fronteras con Irak, los Emiratos Árabes Unidos, Yemen, Catar, Jordania, Kuwait, Omán. El tráfico rodado circula por la derecha, en consonancia con la convención de
La vida económica y cotidiana se rige por la zona horaria de UTC+03:00, alineando el país con sus vecinos regionales.
Kabsa, the national rice dish of long-grain rice cooked in a broth of lamb or chicken with black lime, cardamom, cloves and rose water, originated in the Najd region and travels with Saudi diaspora communities as the meal that collapses time and geography back to a particular grandmother's kitchen.
Saudi Arabia's 2–1 defeat of Argentina at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar — while Lionel Messi's team was ranked third in the world — produced scenes of spontaneous street celebration across the kingdom and a government-declared national holiday the following morning.
The Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, is the world's largest continuous sand desert — 650,000 square kilometres of dune fields reaching 250 metres in height — a landscape so inhospitable that it remained unsurveyed by Westerners until Wilfred Thesiger's crossings in 1946 and 1947.