King Salman Park, the vast green project taking shape on the site of Riyadh’s former air base, is preparing for a phased soft opening, according to MEED. Speaking at the Shaping Mega Projects conference in Riyadh on 28 September, Dale Chadwick, acting chief executive of the King Salman Park Foundation, said the foundation is moving from construction to operations, and that announcements are expected “in the coming months”.
No part of the park is open yet. MEED reports that the foundation “has not yet opened an asset”, and that its opening plan was due to go to the board at the end of that week. Chadwick said that some of the landscaped areas are ready. “We could open tomorrow,” he said, as quoted by MEED, but the foundation must first go through a process.
A soft opening is a familiar way to bring a large public site into use. Rather than unveiling everything on a single day, operators open sections in turn, watch how people use them and adjust before a full launch. On a site of this size, opening in phases is a practical choice as much as a cautious one.
The report is a progress check on Riyadh’s flagship green project. King Salman Park was launched in 2019 as one of the city’s large quality-of-life projects. The move from building it to running it is the moment when years of construction begin to turn into a place that residents can use.
A park on a former air base
The scale is large by any measure. ArchUp, writing in February, gave the site as 16.6 sq km on the former Riyadh Air Base, about seven times the size of London’s Hyde Park and five times New York’s Central Park, with work begun in 2019. MEED gives a figure of 12 sq km of green space and public domain. The two numbers come from different sources and may not describe the same area.
The plans published so far describe a landscape shaped by the climate. According to ArchUp, they include valleys modelled on wadis, the dry river beds of the Arabian landscape, designed to create cooler microclimates. More than a million trees are planned, irrigated with treated wastewater. A route called the Innovation Loop is intended for walking, cycling and electric transport.
The Royal Arts Complex
The park’s cultural anchor is the Royal Arts Complex, which ArchUp describes as a home for performance spaces and galleries. According to MEED, it is due to be handed over to the Ministry of Culture within three to six months. MEED counts the complex among the park’s anchor assets, the major buildings expected to draw visitors in their own right.
For one of the park’s most important buildings, that handover would mark a clear step from construction towards use. It would also place a major cultural venue inside a public park, bringing performance, exhibitions and open space together on a single site in the capital.
Water, planting and a change of plan
The landscape is being built at scale. About 4 million plants are planned this year, MEED reports, and a temporary water treatment plant is producing about 50,000 cubic metres of water a day. In a city with little rainfall, water is the material on which the whole park depends.
There is also a change of plan. The third phase of the project is being replanned, and a golf course that had been planned for it will be replaced so that the site can be developed commercially, according to MEED.
The figures behind the project are considerable. MEED puts the public-realm investment, meaning the park’s landscape, paths and public spaces, at about SR50bn ($13.3bn). A further SR150bn of private assets is planned, of which about SR20bn has been awarded.
Getting there, and what comes next
Access is part of the design. According to ArchUp, the park is planned to connect to the Riyadh Metro through several stations, as well as to the city’s bus rapid transit network. The metro began opening to passengers in phases in December 2024, so the link would tie the park into a system that many residents already use.
Work on the supporting buildings has moved forward too. In February, ArchDaily published the park’s Operations and Maintenance Building by the Saudi practice Omrania, and reported separately that the park was advancing towards a 2026 opening.
No opening date has been given. What MEED’s report sets out is the order of events: an opening plan before the board, a soft opening in phases, and announcements in the months ahead. Anyone hoping to walk its paths soon will need to wait for those announcements to learn which areas open first, and when.
By the acting chief executive’s account, parts of the landscape are already ready. What remains is the process of letting people in, and for Riyadh, that is the moment a construction site becomes a park.