King Abdullah Park in the Al Malaz district is, in plan, an oval. That is not a coincidence — the park was built on the footprint of Riyadh's old royal racetrack, a long ellipse that fell out of use in the 1980s and lay as bare ground for many years before being reframed as civic park. The oval shape was preserved deliberately. Today, instead of horses, what circulates around the perimeter is a chain of small glass conservatory pavilions: seven of them, evenly spaced, each holding a distinct microclimate.
Walking the ring you move between climates the way an old botanical garden in Europe moves you between continents. The first pavilion is high-humidity, planted with Boston ferns, asparagus ferns, and a hanging row of staghorn ferns mounted on cork plates. The second steps you down to a mid-humidity room of bromeliads and orchids. The third is the dry arc — Agave, Echeveria, Haworthia, a low gravel bed planted with Aloe vera and a single mature Yucca rostrata. Each pavilion runs its own controlled air, with quiet misting cycles that keep visitors and plants comfortable.
"The pavilions read, from a distance, as lanterns set down on the perimeter of an oval — small bright rooms of green, glowing slightly in the late afternoon."
An Educational Pavilion Ring
The pavilions were never intended only as display. Each houses a teaching panel and, on weekday mornings, a roster of school visits move slowly between them. The educational team — botanists from King Saud University, working in partnership with the municipal parks department — uses the ring to introduce arid-zone microclimate engineering: how the same outdoor air, run through different humidity and shading systems, can support radically different plant communities.
For our register, the pavilion ring is one of the most useful single sites in Riyadh, because seven different communities can be observed in one slow walking visit. The ring also rewards repeat visits. The dry-arc collection in particular changes character noticeably between winter and high summer.
Notes from the Spring 2026 Visit
The most recent register update follows a March 2026 walk through the ring. We logged twenty-three new species into the index, including a young Welwitschia mirabilis trial planting in the dry arc — a long-shot experiment, since Welwitschia is a Namib specialist, but the team is curious whether the controlled humidity regime can support it. We will revisit in autumn to record outcomes.