House of Frankincense: AlUla Reintroduces an Ancient Material With a Contemporary Eye

SPA

Frankincense has shaped trade routes, rituals, and entire landscapes — but in AlUla’s Old Town, it returns in a format that feels unmistakably present.

The new House of Frankincense arrives inside the Incense Road experience, placing the spotlight on a material that moved across the Arabian Peninsula long before modern borders existed. Instead of presenting it through nostalgia, the project looks at frankincense with a clean, contemporary approach — origin, movement, and cultural relevance, all distilled into a tight, modern format.

At the center of the project is a Saudi–Omani collaboration that connects Wadi Dawkah in southern Oman — the historic home of frankincense trees — with the routes that once carried the resin toward the northwest. What emerges is not a reconstruction, but a clear view of how this material shaped exchanges across the region.

AlUla’s Old Town becomes the perfect setting. The mud-brick walls, narrow pathways and layers of texture make the space feel naturally aligned with the subject. There is no theatricality; the installation stays focused on the material. Discreet lighting, small live elements, and precise scent cues create a direct, well-contained experience.

Amouage plays a key role here, not through spectacle, but through expertise. Their contribution brings accuracy to sourcing, classification and the broader cultural role of frankincense. The result is an editorial-clean presentation: sharp information, no excess.

Visitors move through compact sections that outline the material’s trajectory — from its origin in Dhofar to its presence in trade, daily customs, and cultural identity. Technology appears only where it adds clarity, mainly for mapping ancient routes in a modern visual language.

The House of Frankincense runs until June 26, with sessions in Arabic and English from Tuesday to Saturday and additional access in Chinese. It is a project shaped for the present: concise, well-structured, culturally sharp, and rooted in a material that has connected communities for thousands of years.