Curated refraction and governed glocalisation: cultural programming in Saudi Arabia’s winter at Tantora

Festivals are calendrically reproduced occasions through which governments curate what counts as heritage and how selected pasts are remembered and performed. Saudi cultural festivals reveal how heritage, tourism, and media intersect in glocal settings where contested landscapes are reauthorised for use. The Winter at Tantora festival is an intriguing instance where Nabataean ruins, desert landscapes, and local rituals are manifested through high-tech stages, symphonies, and global DJs. To this end, this study investigates how Saudi Arabia’s Winter at Tantora festival in AlUla functions as a site of cultural translation where heritage, ritual, and global spectacle intersect. A Historical Approach to Discourse and Roudometof’s model of refracted glocalities help in situating the festival within global cultural flows while highlighting its Saudi-specific refractions. Glocalization in the context of Tantora is a synonym for an institutional mechanism of refraction that works through curated spatio-temporalities and semiotic anchors. However, what is refracted is not only the global festival template (spectacle, celebrity performance, experience-economy grammar) but also the site’s heritage and religious narratives. Nabataean/pre-Islamic heritage is mobilized in contestation of an Islamic moral geography that historically frames Mada’in Ṣaliḥ as a cautionary site rather than a leisure destination.