1 · Position
Sharaan sits inside the AlUla Protected Area Network, six reserves declared in 2019 covering 12,160 square kilometres. The Royal Commission for AlUla manages it: boundary fencing, restrictions on hunting and camel grazing, trained rangers, a seed bank and nursery cultivating some two hundred native species, a hundred-hectare restoration pilot with IUCN ROWA, and half a million trees and shrubs planted.
2 · The leopard
RCU took charge of Saudi Arabia’s national Arabian leopard breeding project in 2019. The species is classified Critically Endangered, with roughly 120 left in the wild and none recorded in Saudi Arabia for over a decade; thirty are in human care at the Taif centre. Construction of an Arabian Leopard Rewilding Centre inside Sharaan began in autumn 2025, with the first transfers from Taif planned for the first quarter of 2026. Panthera has trained RCU’s rangers in camera trapping on the reserve.
3 · Why it is in the Library
Because the standard is external. A visitor cap or a conservation pledge is a claim a developer makes about itself; the Green List is an audit of governance carried out by somebody else, against a published benchmark, and it can be lost. That is the distinction the Library uses to decide whether a conservation claim is a fact or a statement, and Sharaan is the entry where the distinction is set.
4 · The house inside it
⚡ Sharaan Resort — 38 suites carved into 500-million-year-old sandstone by Ateliers Jean Nouvel, with an International Summit Centre in an adjacent mountain, 53 keys in all — is in the register, as LHL-H-060 Sharaan by Jean Nouvel, admitted as pipeline before §22 was drafted. It is the only unopened house the Library holds, and §6.1 does not permit a published code to be unpublished, so the row states plainly that it is not open. Rock excavation began on 25 March 2024; the opening has been given as 2023 and then 2026, and the key count reported as 38, 40 and 53 within two years. §22 was written because of houses like this one, and applies from now: it does not reach back to unpublish LHL-H-060 Sharaan by Jean Nouvel. The house already anchors LHL-P-281 Jean Nouvel.
5 · Candour
The Green List assesses governance of the protected area. It does not assess, and is not evidence about, the wider political questions concerning the state that funds RCU, and the Library does not present it as though it were. Both things are true at once: the reserve is externally audited and well run, and the criticism of the context is real. The rewilding centre and the leopard transfers are scheduled, not complete.