Database: Ramm Valley (Discovery Tour)
The Ramm Valley, east of Dadan and the AlUla Oasis, is a series of sandstone canyons carved by the winds and rain over tens of thousands of years, to create extraordinary shapes with a magical and mysterious character.
Standing here 500 million years ago, this landscape did not exist, as these rocks had not even begun to form. At this time, there was no life on land, and enormous rivers flowed for hundreds of miles. These rivers dropped huge amounts of sediment, that built up over millennia. The fine sediment, which was mostly small grains of quartz, was buried deep underground, where heat and pressure transformed it into rock. The enormous amount of rock lay buried, as plate tectonics slowly moved it northwards, for several hundreds of millions of years. Around 30 million years ago, the Red Sea began to open, thrusting up this rock creating a massive sandstone plateau. Over millennia, wind and rain have slowly broken down this plateau, creating the spectacular landscape of "yardangs" we see today.
Today, this area is called "Wadi AlFann", which literally means "Valley of Art". It is becoming an open-air exhibition area of contemporary art and other installations.