Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is the atlas's clearest case of a country whose entries were mostly closed to visitors within living memory. Two of them remain closed to non-Muslims by law, which is a structural fact about access and not a matter of hospitality; the atlas describes them without pretending otherwise. Against that sit a mud-brick capital of the first Saudi state, a valley of Nabataean tombs that opened to tourism in 2020, and a cliff edge two hours from Riyadh that has no infrastructure at all.