Name | Abha |
---|---|
Native name | أبها |
Native name lang | ar |
Coordinates display | inline,title |
Subdivision type | Country |
Subdivision name | |
Subdivision type1 | Province |
Subdivision name1 | Asir |
Leader title | Prince |
Leader name | Faisal ibn Khalid |
Elevation m | 2200 |
Population total | 680,912 |
Population as of | 2009 |
Population density km2 | auto |
Timezone | EAT |
Utc offset | +3 |
Timezone dst | EAT |
Utc offset dst | +3 |
Abha has a well known marketplace, which is open daily. The market is always busy with activity and people moving about. The locals bargain for goods like: fruits, vegetables, and coffee beans among other items. Local specialty items like ornate silver Bedouin jewelry or hand-woven baskets are also available.
Abha (Ebha) served as the administrative center of the 'Asir province during the 2nd period of Ottoman control.
The area is subject to rain, sometimes heavy, some of its neighboring villages and rural areas are sometimes the witnesses of flash-floods during the winter. The cooler weather, comparatively to the rest of the peninsula, makes it an attraction point during the summer.
Abha is the administrative capital of the Asir region, therefore home to the governorate of Asir. All Government departments are located there. Also there are extensive medical and educational facilities. King Khalid University and Prince Sultan College for Hotel Management are located in Abha. There is a regional international airport in Abha that has direct flights to Jeddah, Taif, Riyadh, Dammam, Dubai and Cairo. Al Watan, which is one of the main Saudi daily newspapers, has its head office and printing presses in Abha.
The old Shadda Palace, thought to have been built around 1820, has been converted to a museum.
Cable cars have been installed in the city and its surroundings providing a view of the landscape.
The village of Rijaal Almaa, a 40 minute drive down the mountains to the south-west of Abha, contains 5 and six storey traditional houses dating 400–600 years old built from local stone and quartz. One of the houses has been converted to a museum, contains examples of traditional women's and men's attire, ornamentation, farm implements, household utensils, and even old jailers' implements for restraining 'culprits'.
A lively weekly traditional Tuesday market takes place in the centre of Abha, near the Al Mafteheh tourist complex. The market contains local produce wares, spices and clothes, with buyers and sellers coming from regional areas, including a decreasing number of traditionally dressed Tihama men in striped sarong and with their long oiled hair ringlets capped by circlets of herbs and flowers, which gives them their other colloquial name "Flower men of the Tihama".
Only 20 minutes drive from Abha is the Al Habbalah village. Inhabited until the 1970s, the traditional stone and thatch houses perch precariously on narrow terrace edges down the side of an escarpment. Previously only reached by ropes and pulleys, a modern telephrique (cable car) now allows visitors access and a modern tourist centre has been built. The houses are slowly being restored and some now are accessible.
Paragliding has become and increasingly popular sport. Winter sees pilots launch from Jebel Al Hudda near Muhayil, a one hour drive north of Abha towards the Tihama. In summer pilots launch from the purpose built launch site near the intercontinental hotel. With the gracious patronage of the Emirs of Assir, a four day paragliding competition takes place at this launch site on Jebel Al Sooda, some 2500 metres above sea level, during the summer Assir Festival.
Category:Qahtanites Category:Abha Category:'Asir Province Category:Populated places in Saudi Arabia
ar:أبها ca:Abha da:Abha de:Abha et:Abhā es:Abha fa:ابها fr:Abha (Arabie Saoudite) ko:아브하 it:Abha lt:Abha ml:അബഹ nl:Abha ja:アブハ pl:Abha pt:Abha ru:Абха sr:Абха fi:Abha tl:Abha tr:Abha ur:ابھا vo:Äbha war:Abha zh:艾卜哈This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
The World News (WN) Network, has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to user privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for wn.com, as well as e-mail newsletters.
We do not collect personally identifiable information about you, except when you provide it to us. For example, if you submit an inquiry to us or sign up for our newsletter, you may be asked to provide certain information such as your contact details (name, e-mail address, mailing address, etc.).
When you submit your personally identifiable information through wn.com, you are giving your consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information as set forth in this Privacy Policy. If you would prefer that we not collect any personally identifiable information from you, please do not provide us with any such information. We will not sell or rent your personally identifiable information to third parties without your consent, except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy.
Except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy, we will use the information you provide us only for the purpose of responding to your inquiry or in connection with the service for which you provided such information. We may forward your contact information and inquiry to our affiliates and other divisions of our company that we feel can best address your inquiry or provide you with the requested service. We may also use the information you provide in aggregate form for internal business purposes, such as generating statistics and developing marketing plans. We may share or transfer such non-personally identifiable information with or to our affiliates, licensees, agents and partners.
We may retain other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Such third parties may be provided with access to personally identifiable information needed to perform their functions, but may not use such information for any other purpose.
In addition, we may disclose any information, including personally identifiable information, we deem necessary, in our sole discretion, to comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal proceeding or governmental request.
We do not want you to receive unwanted e-mail from us. We try to make it easy to opt-out of any service you have asked to receive. If you sign-up to our e-mail newsletters we do not sell, exchange or give your e-mail address to a third party.
E-mail addresses are collected via the wn.com web site. Users have to physically opt-in to receive the wn.com newsletter and a verification e-mail is sent. wn.com is clearly and conspicuously named at the point of
collection.If you no longer wish to receive our newsletter and promotional communications, you may opt-out of receiving them by following the instructions included in each newsletter or communication or by e-mailing us at michaelw(at)wn.com
The security of your personal information is important to us. We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during registration and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100 percent secure, however. Therefore, though we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
If we decide to change our e-mail practices, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we think appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
If we make material changes to our e-mail practices, we will notify you here, by e-mail, and by means of a notice on our home page.
The advertising banners and other forms of advertising appearing on this Web site are sometimes delivered to you, on our behalf, by a third party. In the course of serving advertisements to this site, the third party may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser. For more information on cookies, you can visit www.cookiecentral.com.
As we continue to develop our business, we might sell certain aspects of our entities or assets. In such transactions, user information, including personally identifiable information, generally is one of the transferred business assets, and by submitting your personal information on Wn.com you agree that your data may be transferred to such parties in these circumstances.