In the cool months of winter, AlUla becomes a meeting place for culture, memory, and celebration. From 18 December 2025 to 10 January 2026, Winter at Tantora returns as the flagship AlUla Moments festival in the heart of the oasis. Rooted in the historic Tantora sundial and the farming seasons it once guided, the festival now gathers music, heritage, art, and gastronomy in one setting.
This edition focuses on close-up experiences such as guided talks, small-group walks, tasting journeys, and street concerts that keep AlUla’s living heritage within reach of every visitor.
What is Winter at Tantora?
Winter at Tantora began as a local celebration marking the start of the winter planting season in AlUla. The name comes from the Tantora sundial in Old Town, a stone marker that once helped farmers decide when to sow, irrigate, and share precious water. Over the last few years, the festival has evolved into a multi-week cultural season under the AlUla Moments banner. It blends:
- History and heritage
- Music and performance
- Gastronomy
- Community spaces
Midday at Tantora
At the centre of the 2025–26 edition is a deceptively simple experience: Midday at Tantora. Every day at 12:00, small groups gather in Tantora Square for a 20-minute guided heritage talk around the historic sundial. The experience is free, but requires advance booking, and is offered in Arabic and English. In that short window, a local guide explains how this stone device once organised life between Old Town and the oasis:
- Marking the start of winter planting and other key agricultural moments
- Helping coordinate irrigation turns and water rights
- Signalling rhythms of markets, prayer, and community gatherings
It is a small, focused encounter, but it sets the tone for the whole festival. Visitors see that Winter at Tantora is not an invented brand: it grows directly from a tool that helped generations of AlUla residents read the sky and organise their year.
Old Town Nights
When the sun sets, the focus moves a few alleyways away to Old Town Nights, one of this season’s most atmospheric offerings.
A Living Stage in the Amphitheatre
Held between 18 December 2025 and 10 January 2026, Old Town Nights is billed as heritage shows and fine dining under AlUla’s stars. The evening begins at the Old Town open-air amphitheatre, where guests watch a 70-minute performance shaped by AlUla’s stories:
- Ensemble pieces inspired by oasis life and trade routes
- Music and movement that echo traditional celebrations
- Visual design that uses mudbrick, starry skies and surrounding ruins as a natural backdrop
The show is recommended for ages 12 and above, hinting at a more layered, theatrical experience rather than a simple tourist show.
Dining Inside AlUla Fort
Those who book the full package continue onwards for a lantern-lit walk through Old Town before sitting down to dinner inside AlUla Fort, a historic structure overlooking the town. Menus highlight:
- Local ingredients such as dates, wheat, citrus and herbs
- Dishes shaped by regional Saudi recipes, reinterpreted with modern techniques
- A multi-course flow that mirrors a traditional extended gathering
Eating within stone walls that have witnessed centuries of caravans and communities gives the meal a sense of time depth; food becomes another form of storytelling.
Old Town Culinary Voyage
If Old Town Nights uses performance to tell AlUla’s story, Old Town Culinary Voyage tells it through flavour. This four-stop tasting journey leads guests through different restaurants and venues in Old Town on selected dates between 18 December 2025 and 10 January 2026. At each stop, a carefully plated dish is paired with a short narrative:
- How local families preserve food for winter
- Which spices travelled along caravan routes into the oasis
- Why certain dishes are associated with Eid, weddings, or harvest time
Promotional campaigns describe it as a “passport to AlUla flavours” and a “4-stop tasting tour crafted by top chefs,” emphasising the bridge between fine dining and inherited recipes. For many visitors, this becomes their most direct contact with Saudi domestic culture. Recipes that lived for generations in home kitchens now appear on festival menus, but they still carry memories of family tables and seasonal rhythms.
Old Town Wall Art Walk
Another new focus this season is on the visual language of Old Town itself. The Old Town Wall Art Walk is a one-hour guided tour running from 19 December 2025 to 13 February 2026, crossing the Winter at Tantora period. Small groups follow a Rawi (storyteller) through alleys where painted motifs still decorate mudbrick façades or have been reimagined as contemporary murals. Guides talk about:
- Traditional geometric patterns and florals
- Symbols linked to celebration, identity, or protection
- How local artists today are reworking these motifs in a modern arts district context
Because mudbrick is fragile, some drawings are fading. Putting them at the centre of a guided walk quietly raises awareness of preservation, encouraging visitors to see Old Town not just as a backdrop for selfies, but as a delicate, living archive.
Similar to the famous Al-Qatt Al-Asiri wall art tradition in the south, AlUla’s decorations carry social meaning, hinting at family status, festive moments, and even personal taste in colour and pattern.
Shorfat Tantora in AlJadidah
During Winter at Tantora, part of AlUla’s nightlife is free and completely outdoors. Shorfat Tantora transforms the streets of AlJadidah Arts District and AlManshiyah Plaza into a musical corridor. Musicians perform from balconies and raised platforms, looking out over Incense Road and nearby squares. Crowds wander between cafés and galleries while:
- Traditional ensembles play regional rhythms
- Contemporary bands and orchestras add new sounds
- Families pause, listen, move on, and discover another performance further down the street
With free entry and walk-in access, Shorfat Tantora functions almost like an open-air majlis, but stretched across multiple façades. It turns everyday buildings into stages and invites both residents and visitors to share the same soundtrack for a few winter nights.
AlManshiyah Carnival
In the historic railway district, Winter at Tantora takes on a playful tone. From 19 December 2025 to 10 January 2026, AlManshiyah Carnival brings games, parades, live music and street food to the plazas around the old station. Entry is free, with activities built for all ages.
Earlier coverage describes the carnival as:
- A place of vintage-style games and colourful rides
- Roaming performers and small shows
- Local vendors selling crafts, snacks, citrus and seasonal produce
What was once a hub of movement and trade becomes, during winter, a hub of play and family time. Children race between attractions while their grandparents point out how this district connected AlUla to the wider world in the railway era.
Concerts as Cultural Stages
While the festival leans heavily into intimate experiences, large-scale concerts still anchor the season, now with stronger cultural framing.
Ahlam and the Year of Handicrafts – Thanaya AlUla
On 26 December 2025, Emirati superstar Ahlam performs at Thanaya AlUla in a concert dedicated to Saudi Arabia’s Year of Handicrafts. The night combines:
- Immersive activations highlighting Saudi crafts
- A dramatic natural setting framed by cliffs
- A headline performance by one of the Gulf’s most recognisable voices
By tying a major pop concert to a year-long national initiative celebrating artisans and traditional skills, Winter at Tantora shows how entertainment can act as a powerful gateway to heritage.
Maraya and an All-Female Orchestra
At Maraya, the mirrored concert hall in Ashar Valley, the 2025–26 programme includes:
- Wael Kfoury on 19 December 2025
- Legendary Lebanese singer Elissa on 9 January 2026, performing for the first time with an all-female orchestra conducted by Hany Farhat
Elissa’s concert, in particular, offers a new story: women not only in the audience, but on stage as a full orchestral ensemble, in one of Saudi Arabia’s most iconic venues.
Winter at Tantora and the Future of Saudi Heritage
Winter at Tantora 2025–26 shows how Saudi cultural seasons are maturing. The festival still has headline concerts, but its soul is now in smaller moments: a 20-minute talk beside the Tantora sundial, a four-course tasting that carries family memory, a walk past fading wall art with a storyteller, and free balcony concerts where neighbours and visitors share the same street. Together, these experiences present heritage as something lived in real time. Sung, served, and narrated in the very spaces where it was born.
The same winter sun that once cast a shadow on the Tantora stone now lights up stages, murals and family gatherings across AlUla. Each year, as the festival returns, it writes a new chapter in the story of how Saudi Arabia understands, protects, and shares its cultural identity with the world.
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