The Farasan Islands are being pushed up out of the Red Sea by salt. Beneath the archipelago sits a buried dome of salt, left when the sea evaporated millions of years ago, and as it rises it lifts the old reefs with it — so the islands themselves are dead coral, raised into limestone plateaux standing up to 70 metres above the water that grew them. More than 170 lie scattered 40 kilometres off Jazan, their raised rims enclosing shallow turquoise lagoons, seagrass beds and dense mangroves where ospreys and pink-backed pelicans nest and green turtles haul ashore in March and April. Farasan Kebir, the main island, carries about a thousand gazelles — an endemic subspecies cut off from the mainland since the last ice age, and the largest gazelle population left in Saudi Arabia. Once a year the sea delivers the islands' great event: parrotfish, hareed in Arabic, mass in the shallows to spawn, and the whole town wades out to meet them.
You reach them on a free government ferry from Jazan, an hour across water that goes pale and glassy as the reef flats rise beneath it. Farasan town is built from cut coral blocks: Beit Al-Rifai, the 1922 house a pearl merchant filled with carved gypsum and coloured glass; a mosque raised by another pearl trader in 1928; an Ottoman fort on the ridge; and Al-Qassar, some 400 stone houses along five lanes, now empty. Rome garrisoned these islands centuries before any of it. Beyond the town the shore turns to sharp fossil coral rather than sand, small boats remain the only way between islands, and the beaches stay empty — a coast that became a protected area, then a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2021, before anyone developed it.