Saudi Arabia Is Building a Park Five Times the Size of Central Park on a Runway

The world's largest urban park is rising on a decommissioned military airfield in the heart of Riyadh, backed by billions in sovereign capital and run by the man who turned a Singapore casino resort into the world's most profitable integrated property.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Market • 2026-06-09

In March 2019, King Salman bin Abdulaziz walked to a lectern in Riyadh and announced four giga-projects that would reshape the Saudi capital. Three were what you might expect from a petro-state with money to spend: a sports boulevard, a city art program, a forestation initiative. The fourth was something stranger. Where the Royal Saudi Air Force had parked its jets on central Riyadh land since 1945, the king said, the Kingdom would build the largest urban park on earth. The airbase had already outlived its purpose: King Khalid International Airport had taken the city's commercial aviation thirty kilometers north in 1983, leaving the old site a rump military installation embedded in what had become a dense urban center. Demolition of the base began in 2021. By late 2026, the first section of King Salman Park is scheduled to open.

The Land

The site covers 16.6 square kilometers near the geographic center of Riyadh, occupying the footprint of what had been simultaneously the city's original airport and, after 1983, one of its primary military air bases. To understand the scale: Hyde Park in London covers 1.42 square kilometers. New York's Central Park covers 3.41. King Salman Park at full build-out will be roughly seven times Hyde Park and five times Central Park. Over 13 million cubic meters of soil have already been excavated to begin reshaping a terrain that was essentially flat tarmac and runway into a landscape of engineered valleys, dunes, and waterways.

The master plan, led by Saudi firm Omrania as principal design consultant in collaboration with Danish studio Henning Larsen, organizes the park around a network of branching valleys inspired by the Arabian Peninsula's seasonal wadi riverbeds. These vegetated corridors cut up to thirty meters deep into the terrain, creating shaded microclimates, structuring pedestrian movement, and providing respite from Riyadh's desert heat. At the core, a 7.2-kilometer circular promenade called the Innovation Loop connects cultural venues, sports facilities, and mixed-use zones by foot, bicycle, and electric or autonomous transit. Encircling the site are six major road connections and six metro and bus rapid transit stations, tying the park into Riyadh's still-new public transport network.

Gerber Architekten led the park's landscape design in joint venture with engineers Buro Happold and Setec. The firm won RIBA's inaugural Middle East Award for the scheme. The critical engineering challenge is water: Riyadh receives roughly 100 millimeters of rain per year, making conventional planting strategies impossible at this scale. The park's solution routes approximately 150,000 cubic meters of treated wastewater daily through a subsurface irrigation network, polished to near-drinking-water quality on site before feeding the root systems of approximately one million trees across the 16.6 square kilometers. Soil remediation of the former airfield has been undertaken in layers: over bedrock, a two-meter-deep matrix combining excavated site material, red soil from the region, compost, and mulch. Evaporation is suppressed by burying the irrigation lines beneath that growing medium. The result is a manufactured ecosystem in a climate that, without intervention, produces sand.

The Buildings

The cultural anchor of the park is the Royal Arts Complex, a 320,000-square-meter cluster of thirteen separate structures designed by the late Ricardo Bofill and his Barcelona-based studio, Bofill Taller de Arquitectura. The complex stretches along a 1.5-kilometer central boulevard positioned at the western edge of the Innovation Loop, where the urban edge of Riyadh transitions into the open parkland. It includes a 2,300-seat National Theatre, a 106-meter Museum of Civilizations, an art library, a cinema hall, and a group of academies for performing arts, visual arts, and music. Bofill's material palette draws from the surrounding desert, using warm tones calibrated to absorb and reflect the landscape without literal mimicry, with deep-shadow buildings arranged around sunlit patios. Construction is underway; Modern Building Leaders won the contract at an estimated cost of SR 7.5 billion, roughly $2 billion.

Adjacent to the RAC sits a visitor center designed by David Adjaye Associates, built from rammed earth in a form that draws on Salmani architectural tradition. Elsewhere around the Loop: a Grand Mosque by London-based Mangera Yvars Architects, a Museum of the Earth by Gerber Architekten organized around a man-made canyon, a golf course, and a bird and butterfly sanctuary. A stadium by Populous, planned for the FIFA 2034 World Cup, is embedded in the broader site.

The Art Park section within Phase 1 is the area expected to open first, in late 2026, according to the RIBA project page. Substantial completion of the park's main components is targeted for 2027.

The Money and the Man

The project sits within a bundle of four Riyadh giga-projects launched together in 2019 and allocated an estimated combined $23 billion in government funding. The King Salman Park Foundation, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, oversees construction and investment management.

In December 2022, the Foundation's board announced the appointment of George Tanasijevich as CEO. Tanasijevich had spent nine years as President and CEO of Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, from 2011 to 2020, the period during which MBS became widely regarded as the most profitable integrated resort in the world. Before that, he served as Managing Director of Global Development for Las Vegas Sands Corp across an eighteen-year tenure with the company, evaluating expansion opportunities throughout Asia. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

The appointment is telling. Marina Bay Sands was not just a casino. It was a mixed-use destination property anchored to public infrastructure, designed to generate surrounding economic activity and raise the value of a reclaimed waterfront district in Singapore. The mandate at King Salman Park is structurally similar: deliver a destination that attracts international visitors, justifies private investment, and lifts real estate values across a broad area of central Riyadh.

The private capital is arriving. In 2023, the Foundation launched the King Salman Park Real Estate Fund, a SAR 4 billion vehicle established in partnership with Saudi French Capital Company and Naif Al-Rajhi Investment Group, covering over 290,000 square meters of mixed-use development within the park boundaries. A second fund, a SAR 3.8 billion vehicle managed by Mulkia Investment, was announced in late 2025 to develop an additional mixed-use district adjacent to the park's metro station, backed by a mix of Saudi and international investors. In March 2026, the Foundation arrived at MIPIM in Cannes and closed two further packages: a $3 billion-plus fund for Package 5, led by Kolaghassi Development Company, and an $850 million Package 4 award to Retal Urban Development. Total committed investment across all five development packages has now crossed SAR 20 billion. Knight Frank valued the park itself at $9.4 billion as of July 2024.

The residential and commercial ambitions are substantial. The park and its surrounding district are planned to ultimately house 96,000 residents in 27,000 units, provide office space for 30,000 workers, and accommodate 50 million annual visitors. More than 50 developers are currently in negotiations across thirteen commercial packages, with eleven at the active transaction stage.

The Real Estate Thesis

The market logic underlying King Salman Park is a familiar one, applied at unfamiliar scale. Parks increase surrounding property values. This has been documented across enough cities, from the premium commanded by Central Park-facing apartments in Manhattan to the uplift generated by High Line frontage in Chelsea, that it has become almost an axiom of urban real estate. What Saudi Arabia is attempting at King Salman Park is to manufacture that dynamic from scratch in a city where, historically, green space has been scarce.

Before the Vision 2030 initiatives, Riyadh's per-capita green space stood at roughly 1.7 square meters per resident. The target is 28 square meters. The full green package, spanning King Salman Park plus the Green Riyadh forestation initiative, aims to plant 7.5 million trees citywide and lower average temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius, with localized cooling of up to 15 degrees in heavily planted zones.

The climate infrastructure argument is real in a city where summer temperatures routinely exceed 45 degrees Celsius and the urban heat island effect is severe. Research on Riyadh specifically has found that green spaces with restricted access in affluent neighborhoods can command property premiums of 10 to 18 percent. A new Saudi law permitting foreigners to purchase property in designated zones, effective January 2026, removes a structural barrier that had historically limited international capital's participation in the uplift story.

What distinguishes King Salman Park from comparable projects elsewhere, however, is that the green space is not incidental to the real estate development strategy. It is the anchor. The park is not being built because a developer wanted to sell apartments nearby. The apartments are being structured and sold because the sovereign is building the park. The sequencing is inverted from the private-sector playbook: public infrastructure first, then the private capital follows the premium. In a market where land allocation, planning approvals, and infrastructure delivery are controlled by the same entity that chairs the park's foundation, the risks of the standard urban greenification thesis are substantially compressed.

What Is Actually Being Built

The strangest dimension of King Salman Park is not its size. It is what the project represents as a category of development. Riyadh's main airport opened in 1945 on a sand clearing with a windsock and a few tents. It became the city's commercial gateway, then was superseded, then was repurposed as a military base embedded in a city that had grown around it. The base was demolished in 2021 and 2022 to make room for the park.

A petro-state has spent two years bulldozing a military air base it moved to a new location south of the city specifically so it could plant a million trees and build a 2,300-seat theatre in the resulting void at the center of its capital. It has engineered a daily water recycling operation capable of sustaining an ecosystem that has no natural right to exist in this climate. It hired the man who ran the world's most profitable casino-hotel to run a park. And it has attracted over $5 billion in committed private-sector real estate investment around that park before it has opened.

Whether the 50-million-visitor projection proves realistic, whether the microclimate engineering performs as designed at full scale, whether Riyadh's housing market can absorb 27,000 new units in a district where nothing existed before, these are legitimate uncertainties. But the framework is coherent. Green space as climate infrastructure and green space as a real estate value engine are not competing ideas in this project. They are the same idea. The sovereign is betting that a city willing to cool itself into livability, through engineered rivers and a million planted trees on a former runway, is a city that can attract the private capital necessary to house and employ the people who will actually use the park.

The first visitors arrive in late 2026. The runways are already gone.