King Salman Park: 16 km² Urban Oasis and Expo 2030 Gateway

King Salman Park stands as the centerpiece of Riyadh’s transformation from a sprawling desert metropolis defined by asphalt and concrete into a livable, green, human-scaled city. Occupying 16 square kilometers of prime urban land — an area larger than New York’s Central Park and London’s Hyde Park combined — the park represents one of the most ambitious urban greening projects ever undertaken in an arid environment. Named in honor of King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, the park is being developed on the former site of the Riyadh Air Base, whose closure and relocation freed an extraordinary expanse of land in the heart of the growing city for public benefit. For Expo 2030, King Salman Park serves as a complementary destination and gateway that extends the visitor experience beyond the exposition site into a broader landscape of culture, nature, and recreation.

Site History and Transformation

The transformation of the Riyadh Air Base into King Salman Park is a story of urban evolution that mirrors the broader narrative of Saudi Arabia’s reinvention. The air base, established in the early years of Saudi aviation, occupied a vast tract of land that was once on the city’s periphery but has been engulfed by urban growth over the decades. By the time the decision was made to relocate military aviation operations, the base sat in the geographic center of the metropolitan area, its runways and hangars creating a void in the urban fabric that separated neighborhoods, interrupted traffic flows, and prevented the kind of connected urban development that a growing city requires.

The decision to convert the base to a public park, announced as part of the Riyadh development program under Vision 2030, represented a statement of values: that the highest and best use of this irreplaceable central land was not commercial development (which could have generated enormous revenue) but public amenity. The decision prioritized quality of life, environmental benefit, and urban character over short-term financial return — a choice that reflects the long-term orientation of the Vision 2030 program and the leadership’s understanding that a city’s livability is ultimately its most valuable asset.

Master Plan and Design

The park’s master plan, developed by an international consortium led by Omrania & Associates with Henning Larsen Architects, creates a diverse landscape that encompasses multiple distinct environments within a unified design framework. The master plan organizes the park into several major zones, each with a distinct character and function.

The Green Heart

The central portion of the park is dedicated to a naturalistic landscape that references the diverse ecosystems of the Arabian Peninsula. Rather than imposing a non-native landscape aesthetic — the manicured lawns and temperate-climate plantings that characterize many Gulf urban parks — the Green Heart celebrates Arabian ecology through carefully designed landscapes that evoke the wadis, rocky outcrops, desert meadows, and oasis groves that constitute Saudi Arabia’s natural heritage.

The landscape design employs a palette of native and adapted species selected for their ecological appropriateness, water efficiency, and visual beauty. Date palms, ghaf trees, sidr trees, and various acacias provide the tree canopy, while groundcover plantings include native grasses, wildflowers, and succulents that create seasonal color variations. The planting strategy is designed for ecological maturation over decades — the park will become increasingly verdant and biodiverse as its plantings establish root systems, provide habitat for wildlife, and develop the complex ecological interactions that characterize mature landscapes.

Water features within the Green Heart reference the wadi systems that historically provided water and life in the Arabian landscape. Engineered channels carry treated recycled water through the landscape, creating the sight and sound of flowing water — a sensory experience of profound cultural significance in a desert environment. Pools, fountains, and misting installations provide evaporative cooling that reduces ambient temperatures in their immediate vicinity, creating microclimate zones where visitors can find relief from the heat.

The Royal Arts Complex

The Royal Arts Complex, located within King Salman Park, represents Saudi Arabia’s most ambitious cultural infrastructure investment. The complex comprises a constellation of performing arts venues, visual arts galleries, and cultural spaces that collectively provide Riyadh with a world-class cultural district.

The centerpiece of the complex is a grand opera house designed to international acoustic and staging standards, with a seating capacity of approximately 2,500. The opera house will host performances by Saudi, Arab, and international companies across the full spectrum of performing arts — opera, ballet, orchestral music, theater, and contemporary performance. The facility’s design, developed through an international architecture competition, creates an architectural landmark that signals Saudi Arabia’s commitment to cultural production and appreciation.

Additional performance venues within the complex include a concert hall optimized for orchestral and chamber music, a flexible black-box theater for experimental and contemporary performance, and an outdoor amphitheater that takes advantage of Riyadh’s pleasant winter evenings for open-air cultural events.

The visual arts component includes a museum of modern and contemporary art, exhibition galleries for temporary shows, artist studios, and educational spaces. The museum’s collection development strategy focuses on building a representative collection of Saudi, Arab, and international contemporary art, with acquisition programs that support emerging Saudi artists while securing landmark works from the global art market.

The Royal Arts Complex’s location within King Salman Park creates a synergy between cultural engagement and the natural landscape setting. Visitors to the park can combine outdoor recreation with cultural activities, and the park’s landscaping extends into the cultural complex’s outdoor spaces, creating a seamless transition between nature and culture.

The Botanical Garden

The botanical garden within King Salman Park is designed as both a public amenity and a scientific institution, combining recreational gardens with research facilities, seed banks, and conservation programs focused on the flora of the Arabian Peninsula and other arid regions.

The garden is organized into several thematic sections. The Arabian Garden showcases the native plants of the Arabian Peninsula, organized by geographic region and habitat type. Visitors can explore representations of the Rub al-Khali desert flora, the Hejaz mountain vegetation, the coastal mangroves of the Red Sea and Gulf, and the agricultural oasis ecosystems that have sustained Arabian civilization for millennia.

The Arid Lands Garden expands the perspective to include plants from arid regions worldwide — the American Southwest, the Australian Outback, the Namib Desert, the Mediterranean scrublands, and the high-altitude deserts of Central Asia. This comparative approach allows visitors to appreciate the convergent adaptations that plants from different continents have evolved in response to similar environmental pressures.

The Conservation Garden is dedicated to threatened and endangered plant species from the Arabian Peninsula and surrounding regions. This section serves both educational and scientific purposes, maintaining living collections of rare species as insurance against extinction and providing research material for botanical scientists studying arid-land plant biology.

Greenhouse facilities within the botanical garden allow the display of plant collections that cannot survive Riyadh’s outdoor climate, including tropical species, temperate forest species, and alpine plants. These controlled-environment facilities provide visitors with immersive experiences of plant communities from around the world while supporting the garden’s research and conservation programs.

Sports and Recreation Zones

King Salman Park incorporates extensive sports and recreation facilities that serve the daily fitness and leisure needs of Riyadh’s population. Running and cycling trails traverse the park’s landscape, providing safe, scenic, car-free routes for exercise and commuting. Sports fields, courts, and fitness areas accommodate organized and informal sports activities. Playgrounds and family recreation areas provide dedicated spaces for children and families.

The park’s sports facilities are designed to international standards and include competition-quality venues that can host sporting events. This dual-use design — serving daily public use and periodic event hosting — maximizes the return on the infrastructure investment and contributes to Riyadh’s growing profile as a sports event destination.

Environmental Impact

King Salman Park’s environmental impact extends well beyond its boundaries, contributing to measurable improvements in Riyadh’s urban environment that benefit the entire metropolitan area.

Urban Heat Island Mitigation

The park’s 16 square kilometers of vegetation provide significant cooling through evapotranspiration — the process by which plants release water vapor, absorbing heat energy from the surrounding air. Studies of comparable large urban parks indicate that the cooling effect extends several hundred meters beyond the park’s boundaries, reducing ambient temperatures in adjacent neighborhoods by 1 to 3 degrees Celsius during peak summer conditions.

The heat island mitigation effect is particularly valuable for Riyadh, where summer temperatures routinely exceed 45 degrees Celsius and the urban heat island effect can add an additional 3 to 5 degrees in the most densely built-up areas. By introducing a massive vegetated surface into the urban core, King Salman Park helps moderate the extreme temperatures that define Riyadh’s summer climate and reduce the energy demand for air conditioning in surrounding buildings.

Air Quality Improvement

The park’s vegetation provides air quality benefits through the absorption of gaseous pollutants (particularly nitrogen dioxide and ozone), the interception of particulate matter on leaf surfaces, and the production of oxygen through photosynthesis. While these effects are modest relative to the total pollution load of a major metropolitan area, they are measurable and meaningful in the park’s vicinity.

The park’s design also contributes to air quality improvement by reducing vehicle traffic in the surrounding area. The conversion of the air base site from a facility that generated military vehicle and aircraft emissions to a park that displaces some car trips (as residents walk or cycle through the park rather than driving around it) produces a net reduction in transportation emissions.

Biodiversity Enhancement

The park’s landscape, designed with ecological principles and native species, creates habitat for urban wildlife that is otherwise scarce in Riyadh’s built environment. Birds, insects, reptiles, and small mammals find food, shelter, and breeding habitat in the park’s diverse plantings, contributing to urban biodiversity and the ecological health of the metropolitan ecosystem.

The botanical garden’s conservation programs contribute to biodiversity protection at a regional scale, maintaining living collections of threatened species and participating in seed bank networks that preserve genetic diversity against extinction risk. These programs connect King Salman Park to the global network of botanical conservation institutions, contributing to international efforts to protect the world’s plant diversity.

Connection to Expo 2030

King Salman Park’s geographic relationship to the Expo 2030 site creates a combined destination that extends the visitor experience beyond the Expo boundaries and provides a lasting amenity that continues to attract visitors long after the Expo closes.

The park’s northern boundary lies adjacent to the Expo site’s southern boundary, with direct pedestrian and transit connections that allow visitors to move between the two destinations seamlessly. The design of these connections creates a journey through landscape — visitors traveling from the park to the Expo pass through a transitional zone that introduces the Expo’s themes and builds anticipation for the exhibition experience.

During the Expo’s operational period, King Salman Park serves several complementary functions. It provides a green respite for Expo visitors seeking relief from the intensity of the exhibition experience — a place to walk, sit under trees, and decompress before returning to the pavilions. It extends the cultural offering through the Royal Arts Complex, which can host Expo-related performances and exhibitions. And it demonstrates, in its landscape and environmental systems, the kind of sustainable urban transformation that the Expo’s themes of change and collective action advocate.

After the Expo closes, the park’s continued operation provides an ongoing attraction that supports the post-Expo legacy development. Residents and workers in the new urban district that emerges on the former Expo site enjoy the park as a neighborhood amenity, enhancing the district’s livability and property values. Visitors to the King Salman Science Oasis combine their science center visit with a park experience, creating a combined destination that sustains visitor interest across multiple return visits.

Integration with Riyadh’s Transit Network

King Salman Park’s strategic value is amplified by its integration with Riyadh’s rapidly expanding transit infrastructure. The Riyadh Metro — inaugurated in 2025 as the world’s largest fully driverless transit system, carrying 120 million passengers since launch with 99.8 percent on-time performance — provides direct connectivity to the park district. The planned Line 7, with preparation beginning in 2026, will connect Diriyah Gate in the north to Qiddiya in the southwest, with a stop at King Salman Park that places the green space at the center of a transit corridor linking the city’s most significant cultural and entertainment destinations. This transit integration transforms King Salman Park from a standalone amenity into a node within a connected network of attractions: visitors arriving at King Salman International Airport (capacity expanding from 56 million to an ultimate 185 million passengers) can reach the park, the Expo 2030 site, Diriyah Gate, the New Murabba downtown development, and Qiddiya’s entertainment complex via continuous metro service. The 150 additional carriages being procured for Line 7 will bring the metro fleet to 470 carriages, ensuring capacity to handle the combined demand of park visitors, Expo attendees, and everyday commuters. For Expo 2030’s expected 42 million visitors, the pedestrian connections between the park and the Expo site — where LAVA’s cellular masterplan encompasses 226 pavilions across five petal-shaped districts — create a combined destination of approximately 22 square kilometers that offers culture, nature, and innovation within walking distance.

Construction and Development Timeline

The park’s development is phased to align with Riyadh’s broader development timeline and the Expo 2030 deadline. The first phase, encompassing the core landscape, primary pathways, and initial recreational facilities, is designed for substantial completion before the Expo opening, ensuring that the park presents a mature, inviting environment to Expo visitors.

The Royal Arts Complex follows a longer development timeline, with the major performance venues reaching completion in phases extending beyond the Expo period. The initial phases of the complex, including the principal concert hall and exhibition galleries, are targeted for completion before or during the Expo, while later phases, including the full opera house development, may extend into the early 2030s.

The botanical garden’s development is inherently long-term, as landscape maturation requires years to decades for plantings to reach their intended scale and character. The garden’s initial planting and hardscape are designed for Expo-period readiness, but the full realization of the botanical vision will unfold over the decades that follow as the living collections grow, diversify, and mature into the world-class botanical institution that the design envisions.

King Salman Park, in its ambition, scale, and environmental significance, represents a statement about the kind of city Riyadh aspires to become — one where nature and culture are woven into the urban fabric, where public amenity takes precedence over commercial exploitation, and where the quality of the human environment is recognized as the foundation of a thriving society. Its partnership with Expo 2030 amplifies both destinations, creating a combined experience that demonstrates Saudi Arabia’s capacity for transformation at the most fundamental level — the transformation of the land itself.