Chaymae Samir

To understand why compounds exist in Saudi Arabia today, you have to go back to the 1930s, when a handful of Americans arrived in the desert and helped change the course of the country’s history.

The real story begins with a problem that Standard Oil of California didn’t know how to solve: how do you convince thousands of Americans to move to a remote corner of Arabia with little modern infrastructure and a completely unfamiliar way of life?

The solution wouldn’t just transform the oil industry. It would create a parallel world hidden behind walls, one that would spread across the Kingdom and leave behind a legacy still visible today.

From Dhahran to Riyadh and Jeddah, the modern compounds that dot Saudi Arabia can all trace their origins back to this unlikely experiment in the desert.

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