Nafud Desert

The Nafud, also called the Great Nafud, is a sand desert in the north of the Arabian Peninsula, lying mainly in Hail Province of Saudi Arabia, north of the city of Hail. It fills a large oval basin about 290 kilometres long and 225 kilometres wide, covering around 65,000 square kilometres.

It is an erg, a sea of sand dunes, and its sand has a distinctive brick-red colour. Strong and sudden winds shape the dunes into large crescents, some rising high above the corridors between them. Rain falls only once or twice a year in many places. To the south east, a long belt of sand called the Dahna links the Nafud with the Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter.

On the southern edge of the desert lies the oasis town of Jubbah, where rock faces hold thousands of petroglyphs of people and animals carved over many thousands of years. Jubbah and Shuwaymis together form the Rock Art in the Hail Region UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed in 2015. The desert also crossed the route of the Darb Zubaydah pilgrim road and was described by nineteenth century European travellers such as Lady Anne Blunt.

Today visitors explore the Nafud by four-wheel-drive on guided trips from Hail, with dune driving, camel rides and desert camps. In winter, events and camping season bring many Saudi families to the sands.

The cooler months from November to March are the only practical time for desert trips. Travel into the dunes should be done with an experienced local guide.

The Dahna, the sand corridor that runs south east from the Nafud, is about 1,287 kilometres long and 24 to 80 kilometres wide, so the red sand belt can be followed for hundreds of kilometres on a map. In a few lowland areas near the Hejaz mountains, oases grow dates, vegetables, barley and fruit. Arabic descriptions trace the desert from the town of Tayma about 450 kilometres eastward.

The Nafud matters to archaeologists. In 2016 a team led by Mathieu Duval of Griffith University dated a fossilised human finger bone found in the desert to about 85,000 years ago, at the time the earliest evidence of modern humans outside Africa and the Levant. Camel engravings at Jebel Misma and Jebel Arnaan point to people moving through the area with the seasons between 12,800 and 11,400 years ago, which ties in with the carvings visitors see at Jubbah.

The desert also turns up in the story of the Arab Revolt. In 1917 Auda abu Tayi led forces on the long desert approach to Aqaba, passing near the edge of the Nafud. T. E. Lawrence asked to cut through the sand, and Auda refused as there was no need. The crossing shown in the film Lawrence of Arabia did not happen.