Hegra is a field of more than a hundred monumental tombs cut into rose-gold sandstone outcrops standing on open desert. The Nabataeans carved them — the same desert traders who made Petra — and this was their great southern city, the largest site they left anywhere below it. Ninety-four of the 111 tombs carry decorated façades. Some owners had a warning cut above the door: a fine of a thousand silver coins, and the curse of the god Dushara, on anyone who disturbed the dead. The most famous tomb, Qasr al-Farid, the Lonely Castle, stands by itself on the plain, cut from a single freestanding boulder. Walk round it and you find the work simply stops partway down — the chisel marks break off, and its four columns still wait for a façade nobody came back to carve.
You walk Hegra only with a local Rawi guide, and there is nothing else out here. The tombs stand a few hundred metres apart across open sand, and the silence between them is broken only by wind. In low sun the sandstone shifts from honey to deep crimson and the stepped crowns throw long shadows across the plain. A little further on, a narrow forty-metre corridor splits the cliffs of Jabal Ithlib and opens onto the Diwan, a hall the Nabataeans cut for feasts in honour of their chief god. For most of two thousand years almost nobody came, the ruins carrying a reputation as a cursed and punished place. Hegra earned Saudi Arabia's first UNESCO listing in 2008 and opened its gates to travellers only in 2020. It is still quiet enough that a visit here feels nothing like a visit to Petra.