Linah Historic Village

Linah is an old historic village in the Northern Borders region of Saudi Arabia, lying south of the town of Rafha on the margins of the Nafud and Dahna deserts. It is known for its many wells cut into solid rock.

References to Linah go back a long way. It appears in the works of the Arab geographers and in early poetry as a watering place on the caravan routes between Najd and Iraq. Popular tradition attributes the digging of its wells to the jinn in the time of the prophet Solomon. The wells are numbered in the hundreds, although many have been filled in or have run dry. In more recent times Linah was an active trading centre where merchants from Najd and Iraq met the desert tribes, and a mud-built governor's palace was erected there in the reign of King Abdulaziz.

Visitors see the narrow, circular mouths of the wells sunk into the rocky ground and the mud palace with its towers and courtyard together with remains of the old market and mud houses. Linah has a special standing in the Northern Borders region as its foremost heritage site.