King Salman Park: frequently asked questions

No opening date has been announced. As of 12 November 2026 the Foundation is preparing a phased soft opening: on 28 September 2026 acting CEO Dale Chadwick said some landscaped areas could open "tomorrow", but that the park needs a process to open in stages, and that an opening plan was going to the board. Announcements were expected "in the coming months", and we have found none yet. We will update this answer the day the Foundation names a date or a first area.

King Salman Park is in north-central Riyadh, on the site of the former Riyadh Air Base (King Salman Air Base), the old city airport. It covers much of the King Abdulaziz District and is bordered by routes including King Abdulaziz Road. The Foundation answers to the Royal Commission for Riyadh City. We do not yet publish a surveyed boundary, because sources describe the footprint in slightly different ways.

Roughly 17 square kilometres. Published figures run from 16.6 to 17.2 km2: Gerber Architekten gives 16.6 to 16.7, MEED and Omrania 16.9, and Parsons and the MIPIM 2026 coverage 17.2, while the Royal Commission says more than 17 million m2. We show each one with its source rather than averaging them, because projects often count peripheral parcels differently. About 11.6 km2 is green space, according to Parsons.

Yes, several times over. Central Park is about 3.41 km2 according to press comparisons, while King Salman Park is reported at 16.6 to 17.2 km2, so roughly five times larger depending on the figure used. Much of King Salman Park is also planned to include buildings, districts and infrastructure, not only open parkland, so the comparison is about footprint rather than lawn.

That is how it is billed, not a measured ranking we can verify. Outlets such as Gulf News describe it as the world's largest urban park, and the Foundation promotes the scale. Rankings depend on what counts as a park and where the boundary sits, so we attribute the claim and show the underlying areas instead.

The King Salman Park Foundation runs it, under the Royal Commission for Riyadh City. The Saudi Press Agency announced Dale Chadwick as CEO on 11 October 2026; he had been acting CEO since at least 28 September. He followed George Tanasijevich, whose departure was first reported on 30 July 2026 without a stated reason. In September 2026 the Foundation moved about 230 to 240 staff from KAFD into an operations building inside the park.

No, they are different places. King Salman Science Oasis is a separate science venue that does sell tickets, for example through Platinumlist, and Okaz describes it as a separate project. King Salman Park is the giga-project on the former air base, which has not opened. If you are searching for tickets, make sure you are looking at the right venue.

Almost certainly you read a 2016 article. An Arab News Pakistan piece titled "King Salman Park opened in Riyadh" dates from 2016 and covers a different, earlier park, not today's giga-project, which was launched on 19 March 2019. It still ranks in searches for "is it open" and confuses readers and some AI summaries. The current park had opened no asset as of 12 November 2026.

A working airfield: the former Riyadh Air Base, also called King Salman Air Base, which had been the city's original airport. The facilities were demolished in 2021 and 2022 to make way for the park. The park was launched on 19 March 2019 as one of four Riyadh projects, and the first major construction contracts, worth about $1 billion, were reported in September 2021.

Yes, a few. Gerber Architekten won the RIBA International Awards Middle East 2025 in the Future Projects category for the park, and Omrania won an Architizer A+ award for the water treatment complex. Saudi outlets reported in July 2026 that the Foundation won a silver award in the Sustainable Development category of the FIABCI Prix d'Excellence 2026, though one FIABCI page may list it among gold winners, so we flag that one as unresolved.

It is the park's cultural district, designed by Bofill Taller de Arquitectura and billed by the Foundation as covering more than 500,000 m2. The Ministry of Culture lists seven venues: the Museum of World Cultures, National Theatre, Royal Institute of Traditional Arts, Arts Library, Arts Cinema, Sculpture Pavilion and Exhibition Dome. Douglas Gautier has been its CEO since April 2025. It is expected to be handed to the Ministry of Culture between December 2026 and March 2027.

The Foundation's Royal Arts Complex page gives 106 metres for the pyramid-like museum building, while other sources, including Saudipedia-based summaries and RCRC-derived coverage, say 110 metres. We show both and do not choose silently: they may reflect different stages of the design or different points of measurement. The founding director, Hartwig Fischer, was announced in July 2024.

Omrania won the international competition as lead design consultant in 2019, with Henning Larsen sharing the master planning, according to Argaam. Gerber Architekten led the landscape design of the park itself and won a RIBA Middle East award for it in 2025. Several other firms report taking part in the competition, so the stages and rankings are not fully clear. Individual buildings have their own architects, such as Bofill for the Royal Arts Complex.

Many contractors, and the full list is not public. Freyssinet Saudi Arabia and Haif Company work together as a joint venture on site-wide infrastructure in Phases 1 and 2. Nesma & Partners and Al-Rashid won landscaping in 2023, and Modern Building Leaders is reported as the Royal Arts Complex contractor. Parsons runs the project management office. The Foundation said in September 2026 that 95 percent of Phase 1 and 2 contracts had been awarded, which measures contract awards, not physical progress.

Parsons provides project management office services to the Foundation under a 25-month contract announced on 23 April 2025. Counting 25 months from April 2025 puts the end around May 2027, though we calculated that date and no end-date announcement exists. The company also describes itself as engineer of record on the park's first packages.

A 20,000-seat arena for touring acts, sport and large events appears in the Foundation's brochures as planned. We found no contractor, no construction start and no delivery date, so it is a plan and not a project under construction. The Phase 3 replanning announced in September 2026 may affect large-scale uses, but no source says so.

Not any longer in the plan, as far as reported. The Royal Golf Course (850,000 m2, 18 holes in the brochure) was part of Phase 3, but MEED reported in September 2026 that Phase 3 is being replanned and the golf course will be replaced to allow the site to be commercialised. The replacement use has not been stated, and the report is from one outlet covering conference remarks. Some older travel pages still list golf.

Omrania describes the park as a composition of nine urban quarters, each with its own identity, from mixed-use neighbourhoods to cultural and educational districts. Gerber's landscape sits inside the central loop as Central Park, with green fingers that carry planting out into the surrounding city. The full list of quarters and their official names is on our districts page; depth of detail varies from district to district.

Most sources give 7.2 km. Omrania says 7.1 km and a travel blog says 7.5 km, so the length varies by source. The Loop is a circular route for walking, cycling and electric or autonomous mobility, linking the cultural district, transport hubs, homes and landscape. The park's brochure also describes 7.25 km of shaded car-free paths, which is a related but separate measure.

It is being replanned. MEED reported in September 2026 that Phase 3 would be re-masterplanned in response to board requests, starting in the following couple of months, and that the planned golf course would be replaced to allow commercialisation. The replacement uses have not been stated. This comes from one outlet's coverage of Chadwick's conference remarks and has no Foundation statement behind it yet.

ArchDaily wrote in February 2026 that initial phases were expected in late 2026, with substantial completion in 2027. Gerber, quoted by Arab News in October 2025, pointed to full completion around 2030. Phase 3 is now being replanned, so timelines may shift. Nothing about this is fixed until the Foundation says so.

There is no single total, because each figure counts something different. SAR 72 billion is a park-only figure reported by ArchDaily in 2026. At the September 2026 MEED conference the plan was described as SAR 50 billion of public realm and about SAR 150 billion of private assets, of which about SAR 20 billion has been awarded. The often-quoted $23 billion is the 2019 total for four Riyadh projects, not the park alone.

Not as an individual buying units off the shelf, as far as we can find. Investment is through developer-level packages and funds, such as the SAR 4 billion District One fund, the SAR 3.8 billion Ajdan and SEDCO Capital fund, Package 4 (Retal) and Package 5 (Kolaghassi). MEED reported 23 developer expressions of interest in September 2026. How many packages exist depends on the counting method: the March 2026 MIPIM coverage speaks of five, while MEED in September spoke of one awarded, one near award and three in design.

Not yet, as far as we can confirm. The programme plans about 12,000 homes, and the announced packages account for about 5,050 of them. No source gives handover or sales-launch dates, so please treat any listing with a date as unverified. Homes are expected to come through the developers named in each package.

The programme figure is 16 hotels with about 2,300 keys, according to Saudipedia's component list. The announced packages account for about 890 keys so far: 250 in the TRIBE hotel, about 200 in the Ajdan fund, 140 or more in Package 4 and about 300 in Package 5. The only confirmed operator is Accor, for TRIBE in Package 1. The operators for the rest have not been named in any source we found.

Parsons' project page forecasts about 50 million visitors a year. It is a single-source forecast, and we have found no Foundation confirmation, so please treat it as an estimate rather than a plan. We cannot yet say how visitors will be counted or admitted, because no asset has opened.

They are two private development packages announced around MIPIM in March 2026. Package 4, led by Retal, is worth SAR 3.2 billion with more than 600 homes, more than 140 hotel keys and about 50,000 m2 of offices. Package 5, led by Kolaghassi with Al Othaim Investment and RXR, is worth SAR 11 billion with about 3,700 homes, about 300 hotel keys and more than 100,000 m2 of offices, beside the park's metro station. Some older summaries swap the two sets of figures. No Package 2 or 3 has been announced.

Almost entirely with treated recycled water, not drinking water. Parsons says treated sewage effluent is planned to supply 100 percent of irrigation, and the water treatment complex was designed for up to 192,000 m3 a day. Riyadh gets about 101 mm of rain a year but loses roughly 1,971 mm to evaporation, so the design leans on underground (subsurface) irrigation and a deep, water-holding soil. In September 2026 the temporary plant was running at about 50,000 m3 a day.

Because they measure three different things. 192,000 m3 a day is the design capacity of the water treatment complex, per Omrania. About 150,000 m3 a day is the treated-wastewater throughput quoted in a Gerber and Omrania interview. About 50,000 m3 a day is what the plant was operating temporarily in September 2026, around a quarter of the design figure. None of them contradicts the others.

The Royal Commission and Parsons cite about one million trees. Parsons also cites 20 million plants, while RIBAJ cites 30 million, so plant counts differ by source and date. MEED reported in September 2026 that landscaping had restarted for the season, with about 4 million plants due this year at 50,000 to 60,000 a day. We have not found a cumulative count of what is already planted.

The risk is considered low overall but concentrated in the low-lying drainage corridors. A 2026 conference paper scored the park's flood susceptibility at 0.32, below the neighbouring Al-Uruba area at 0.38 and well below Wadi Hanifa. Gerber notes the site was once a desert flood zone, and Haif's Phase 2 scope includes stormwater works and an emergency flood pond, as reported by MEED in 2024.

By design and by machine. The Loop is described as a car-free, shaded 7.25 km route, trees are planted to cool and humidify the air, and retaining walls built from local stone create shade. District cooling is contracted too: Saudi Tabreed holds a 25-year agreement for 60,000 refrigeration tonnes, 20,000 of them for the first phase. Summer heat remains a residual risk the design cannot remove.

Not as far as we can confirm. As of 12 November 2026 the Foundation has not opened any asset to the public, according to MEED's 30 September report, and we found no later announcement of an opening, an event or a public metro station for the park. The park is in the "preparing a phased soft opening" stage. If you see a headline saying it has opened, check the date: one widely circulated article is from 2016 and is about a different park.

Not confirmed. The Foundation has not published admission rules, and the claims of free entry we found are on unsourced travel and aggregator pages. Because nothing is open yet, there is no ticket policy to quote. We will publish it once the Foundation does.

There are no confirmed hours, because the park is not open. Travel sites disagree with one another, quoting both round-the-clock access and daytime hours, and none cites the Foundation. Gerber Architekten describes the design as a park accessible around the clock, but that is a design intention, not a published schedule. We will list official hours when they exist.

No official ticketing exists that we can find. Be careful with listings: tickets sold on Platinumlist are for King Salman Science Oasis, a different venue. If you are offered King Salman Park tickets today, treat it with suspicion and check with the Foundation first.

The Royal Commission says the park connects directly to five Riyadh Metro stations (four on the Green Line, one on the Red Line) and 10 bus stations. Saudipedia and some other outlets count six metro stations, so the exact count is not settled. The Red and Green lines opened to passengers on 15 December 2024, but we have found no source confirming that a King Salman Park station is open. We have not verified individual station names beyond those in Arabic press.

Parking is planned, but visitor parking arrangements have not been announced. Planning figures mention 18,000 spaces, and the Grand Mosque package includes underground parking of 29,408 m2 (705 cars) according to its contractor, Freyssinet. Which car parks will serve visitors, and at what charge, is not yet public. We recommend watching for the opening announcement and the metro option.

No. In July 2024 the Saudi Museums Commission said it would open in 2026 under founding director Hartwig Fischer. But the Royal Arts Complex is due to be handed to the Ministry of Culture only between December 2026 and March 2027, and we found no new opening date. A 2026 opening therefore looks unlikely, which is our inference, not a statement by any source.

One is planned and under construction. The Visitor Pavilion (Arabic: مركز الزوار), designed with rammed-earth walls by David Adjaye, spans 90,000 m2 including public space, a nursery, a multi-use hall, meeting rooms, an exhibition area and restaurants. That figure is site and public space, not building floor area. Construction was announced in January 2022 and it is not open yet.