Today we have no real plans, in the sense that our plan is just to aimlessly walk around our neighbourhood. Since we don’t plan on entering anything, I’ll let my partner wear shorts. It’s hot out, and we will be walking around a lot. Let’s go!

Today we will pretend to be architects and explain all of the beautiful buildings we see, why they are the way they are, and how they were built. “Pretend” being the keyword to keep in mind. We will also just show beauty for beauty’s sake, as always. So we start at the north boundary of what is now Historic Jeddah, also known as Al Balad (meaning “The Country”) at the Old Jeddah Gate. 

From our understanding this gate formed part of a wall that completely surrounded the city of Jeddah (now “just” the historic city). As most ancient cities, it had a wall to protect it from invading forces. These walls are said to date back to the 10th century, and they were two parallel walls stretching around the entire city to protect it both from land and from sea. The last large reinforcements are said to be in 1506 when a Mamluk military commander ordered their construction to protect against the Portuguese naval raids. However, in 1947 these walls were destroyed to allow for the city to expand beyond its historical limits. 

These are the remaining walls. You can tell one seems like an archaeological site, but it wasn’t clear to us if the other is the original wall or a reconstruction to show where it would have originally been. As you may quickly notice on today’s tour, Historic Jeddah is going through a gigantic restoration project. As with all Saudi Arabia, this is part of the Vision 2030 for the country, and it is said that Historic Jeddah is a project directly overseen by the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. So, once again, it’s interesting to see Jeddah “before” these upcoming huge transformations. 

Anyway… we’re here to walk around and see what we see. Let’s actually move into the neighbourhood. 

The first features you’ll notice are the big wooden “panels” over the windows. In the above picture you can see them in more of a “wooden” colour/finish and a more “artistic” green/aqua colour. These are the two colours we mainly saw (or variations of wood staining) while walking around Jeddah. If we understood correctly… these are called Rawashin. They’re slightly different than a window, but not quite a balcony… it’s a beautiful in between. And, on top of that, it serves multiple purposes. It allows light and ventilation to enter the house (key for the year round heat), which in turn resolves problems of humidity, and to top it all off allows for greater privacy than glass windows (needed, especially for Muslim women).

Not only is it functional, it’s also beautiful and really gives Al Balad a nice charm. Many of these same descriptions can be said about the Mashrabiyas. (Not sure if we’ve mixed up Rawashin and Mashrabiya, we think not). The difference here is that these are meant mainly for ventilation of the house. These can be over the entire façade of the house, or only “over” the upper windows. These kind of remind us of some of the architecture we saw in Bahrain on the Pearling Path where they had windows high up in their house to force the wind, and therefore relief from the heat, into their homes. 

As you all know, we’re definitely not experts, so we just do our best. And the above picture is just that. We believe it shows both architectural features where the long coverings would be the Mashrabiya and the ones directly over the windows are the Rawashin. If we’re wrong, it will take two minutes to correct this post, hehe. 

The third architectural feature you may have noticed is the colour of the buildings. As many buildings in this part of the world, they are white. If you’ve been following our travels, you can probably guess that this is because they are built from coral limestone that comes from the Red Sea. In the majority of the countries we have so far visited on this trip the older buildings are all built in this fashion. But, something unique to this region (at the time) is our fourth architectural feature. 

You may have noticed it if you paid very close attention to the pictures we’ve already shown, but in the above picture we think it’s pretty obvious and as good of an example as any to show you. If you look closely you’ll see that there are horizontal brown lines that run throughout the building. Why would that be? These “Teklela” or “Tekeel” wood are placed to be able to separate the coral blocks from each other. This unique architectural feature allows for the buildings to be dismantled and reassembled if any part of the house/building became damaged. A truly ingenious idea. 

These different architectural features are present throughout the entirety of Al Balad, but one of the best examples was saved to finish our architectural ramblings, the Nassif House Museum above. Unfortunately for us, although it said it was open online, it is clearly closed. Next time. Let’s continue strolling through Al Balad and show you what we see. 

Now, Al Balad is anything but uniform. Within the old city limits there are a few buildings like above. Although it has some of the architectural features outlined above… is it a new building meant to look old? Is it a building that is older than the others? None of the above? Who knows, not us. 

A feature we didn’t previously highlight (because it wasn’t in the “architecture of Jeddah” site) are the doors. We’ve taken pictures of doors throughout the region while walking or at museums, but here it’s just an open air museum. The doors themselves are typically intricately decorated, typically with geometric designs. And our language learning app made sure that we learned “Arabic door” and “Omani door”, so maybe doors are important, haha. But beyond “just” the door, the area around the doors are often intricately sculpted as well. If you can’t tell by now, we really enjoyed the neighbourhood and looking at all of the amazing buildings. 

Now, we literally just walked around the neighbourhood without any plan. We were literally just exploring and looking at shops, beautiful architecture, and random buildings. Nothing structured at all, much like this post, hehe. So, the next thing we will show on our waltz around Al Balad are the mosques of the area. No self-respecting area of a Middle Eastern city is complete without beautiful mosques.

The first mosque we will show you is Masjid Yousuf Mohammad Naghi. For most of the mosques we don’t have any “smart” information, so we will give what we can. This mosque is just on the outside of the heart of Al Balad neighbourhood, near the larger commercial centres. It seems to be very well attended. All mosques have many people, but this one seemed to be the most within the neighbourhood. 

Al-Memar Mosque, this mosque is in the heart of Al Balad. This mosque was built between 1086 H to 1094 H (1676 – 1683 CE). It is one of the most prominent archaeological monuments from the inception of Jeddah. 

This is Al Mahmal Mosque. Seems very small and new, but very intricately adorned. It was just tucked away between two parts of a mall.

Beyond the mosques we’ve already shown you, there are also all kinds of these “types” of mosques. These are mosques that are just “tucked away” behind/in between commercial buildings. Sometimes we could tell which was the doorway, sometimes the only way for us to tell was when people were entering/exiting for prayers.

We obviously didn’t show you all of the mosques in the area, but there are A LOT. This is awesome when the call to prayer occurs because the entire neighbourhood starts ringing from the call to prayer in all directions, and we absolutely love it. 

Let’s keep wandering!

Now we can show you what we have meant in both Dammam and here in Jeddah. Above is the Saptco bus station. That’s fine, you’ve seen it from much closer. BUT! Look on the left… and you’ll hopefully be able to notice a number of men standing right outside of the exit. These are the men that yell at everyone coming in or out of the bus station with various locations to take you wherever you want to go. In Jeddah the majority are offering Makkah or Madinah, but you also reliably hear Riyadh as well. We took the picture from the other side of the street, but there were also people around us asking if we needed a ride anywhere. It’s filled with people. And it seems that here you just pay per seat, as many people were telling us that they were waiting on one person (hopefully us) before they could leave. Unfortunately for them, we’re staying in Jeddah.

Maybe this post is getting a little long winded, but there are just so many random things to look at throughout Al Balad. It just doesn’t end. As we were walking we saw that there was a “gate” in the distance, so we walked towards that.

Not much to it, and no indication of what it was or when it was used. We’re guessing it is part of the old city walls. But, who really knows? The real “discovery” happened just a bit further when we found a little square with these buildings in them.

But again, who knows why this is here or what it really is. From the map, the translation of this place would be Baraha Bab Sharif… but that doesn’t mean much more to us. No idea. If you know, we’d love to hear it!

Now we go to our last “stop” of the day. The Makkah Gate!

An absolutely HUGE gate. Beautiful, historic, but surrounded by… nothing. An even bigger debris field where there are construction crews just clearing the land. This has to be a part of the revitalization of the neighbourhood, but it is an absolutely HUGE construction area. And Google Maps has not been updated in a long, long time because they have streets and neighbourhoods indicated on the map, but they no longer exist.

Anyway, why is it called “Makkah” if we’re in Jeddah? The reason is because it is the gate towards the city of Makkah, on the road to the holiest city in Islam. Hopefully the area around this gets built up to show the importance of this site, where hundreds of millions of pilgrims have started their journey. Although on its own, this is cool… we’re not done yet. You can actually walk the Hajj route from this gate to one back closer to the centre of Al Balad, and of course we did that. 

The route takes you winding back through the streets of Historic Jeddah by the shops, the buildings, and the mosques of the city.

Then you finally reach Bab Al Furdhah.

And that was our daytime adventures through Al Balad. But, as you can imagine, we’re not done quite yet. Let’s go enjoy the sunset around Jeddah “Lake”.

We just set out to walk around the lake to take in the beauty, and many people thought the same thing. Must be a common activity, especially after a hot day enjoying Al Balad.

After sitting and relaxing a bit, it was time to finally finish our day. Back into Al Balad we go! 

The beauty of Historic Jeddah just doesn’t stop.

We even managed to explore places of Al Balad that we hadn’t found while walking around so much during the day. How?! Like Al Shafï Mosque.

Now it’s back to the historic mosque and the centre of Al Balad to try to find some food. Little did we know that this would become our point of reference for the next few days. We would always end up on this corner taking in the views.

And this is when the area really comes to life. It is now filled with people, while all day there was almost no one in the hot streets. And they’re looking for good deals in all of the little shops throughout the neighbourhood.

But that’s it. We have our food and it’s time to rest. My travel partner started to get tired about an hour or so ago. I guess it’s okay since he carried me around for 18 km today, while never getting further than a single kilometre from the hotel. You can really tell how winding the streets really are! Good night from Jeddah!